Showing posts with label Stormbreaker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stormbreaker. Show all posts

Wednesday, 4 March 2020

Redux Month - Stormbreaker (Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker)

It’s time to address some flaws, welcome to redux month


Through the month of March, I’m going to be taking another look at films I’ve previously reviewed, correcting any mistakes I’d noticed, and/or adding in some new perspective. And the first film I’m gonna be recovering is Stormbreaker.


This was one my earlier reviews (but not the earliest I’m covering) and it’s one I have some regrets over, I have now read the book and I think it’s fine, not one of my favourites, but I might check out the upcoming Alex Rider series they’re developing.

When I first reviewed this film, I concluded that over-marketing could be the reason for the film’s failure, it wasn’t, that was really naïve of me to say. Marketing certainly was a factor for this but the blame seems to land at the feet of everyone’s favourite company, the Weinstein company, who clearly didn’t like the film, gave it a trailer featuring more Ewan McGregor than there was in the film and didn’t bother giving it a wide release in the US, it went straight to DVD in other territories too, this may be the consequence of not having a big studio like Warner Bros. behind it like Harry Potter did.

Its reception probably didn’t help either, it holds a 35% Rotten Tomatoes rating and only a 53% audience score.

So, let’s take another look at Stormbreaker and see what else I missed.

Wednesday, 23 July 2014

Guilty Pleasures #4 Stormbreaker


Stormbreaker is one of a series of books written by Anthony Horowitz, one that was adapted for a film of the same name (originally named Alex Ryder: Operation Stormbreaker) the advantage of 6 different production companies and over a dozen distributions did not stop it taking a fall in the box office. Recovering just $23.6 million of its $40 million budget. So where did it all go wrong? It certainly wasn’t lack of promotional material. Hoping for it to be the next billion dollar film series, like Harry Potter was becoming, they had very high profile marketing, in the UK with BBC and ITV appearances.

No, the reviews for this movie are average at best, 5.6 on IDMB, on 33% on rotten tomatoes. But there’s no reason why another book series could rival Harry Potter, let’s dig into Stormbreaker and see why this wasn’t the franchise for it.