Almost 11 years since one of the great setbacks of recent fantastic cinema
There are countless times in which Hollywood releases a film with the clear intention of being the beginning of a long franchise and then crashing at the box office and that this attempted saga never goes beyond the first film. Today we are going to talk to you about ‘Ender’s Game’, which is available to watch on Netflix and Movistar Plus+.
It is, as you know, the adaptation of a successful science fiction novel written by Orson Scott Card and published for the first time in 1985. At first there was interest in bringing it to the big screen, but the project did not really come to fruition until the signing of Gavin Hood in 2010 to write and direct the film. A surprising choice, since he had just signed the spin-off ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’, which was quite disappointing and still a source of ridicule today, especially for what he did with Deadpool.
He had everything going for him but he went down with a crash
In this way, the six different versions of the script that Card himself had written over the years were left aside to opt for a more ambitious version in which Hood wanted to film ‘Ender’s Game’ at the same time as the adaptation. of ‘Ender’s Shadow’a novel by Card himself published 14 years later and which takes place parallel to ‘Ender’s Game’.
However, there was no money needed for it, although Gavin Hood did have time to prepare the script for the sequel, ‘Ender’s Shadow’, in the hope of being able to film it when ‘Ender’s Game’ was a big hit at the box office.
To achieve this, it had a generous budget of 110 million dollars, a luxurious cast (a ESA Mariposa fresh out of ‘The Invention of Hugo’, Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley, Viola Davis, Hailee Steinfeld and Abigail Breslin or Moisés Arias, which we have seen in ‘Fallout’) and the fact of telling an extraordinary story that had already triumphed in novel form. It seemed like a sure success but it ended up being a huge failure.
Shortly before the premiere came the first big problem for ‘Ender’s Game’, as there was a call to boycott the film due to some statements that Orson Scott Card have done against gay marriage years before. The writer did not apologize but did release a statement stating that his opinions did not matter taking into account the position that the Supreme Court had adopted at that time.
‘Ender’s Game’ finally hit theaters in November 2013 and the crash was indisputable. It is true that during its first weekend it reached number 1 in the United States, but its commercial run around the world closed with revenues of just 125 million, it is estimated that it generated losses worth 68 million dollars. And on this occasion it was not the fault of some horrible reviews, since it can be said that they were left in no man’s land. Surely it had more to do with the fact that just weeks before the magnificent ‘Gravity’ was released…
Obviously, that failure led to plans to continue what could have been a huge saga being cancelled. Let’s keep in mind that the book ‘Ender’s Game’ has five sequels and that ‘Ender’s Shadow’ has another five continuations. There was plenty of material there for a tremendous franchise, but we will never get to see it. At least not with this version, because don’t rule out that Hollywood will try again with ‘Ender’s Game’ later on.
In Espinof | It is Peter Jackson’s biggest failure: this science fiction film wanted to be the post-apocalyptic successor to ‘The Lord of the Rings’
In Espinof | The 34 best science fiction movies in history
