Wolf Man is certainly a strange film as it somewhat cropped up out of nowhere, had a little promotion at Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights before underwhelming people so much they even removed the poor character after a couple of days from the character line-up and now it’s underperforming heavily at the box office.
What went wrong?
Initially, there was a huge backlash over the monster’s design, so much so that this might be the reason that it was pulled from the Halloween Horror Nights line-up. The creature certainly resembled more of a goblin than a werewolf and fans were quicker to trash this particular creature than they were for campaigning against Sonic the Hedgehog’s original appearance.
Now the film has been released it seems as though people aren’t too happy with the film itself with currently a plethora of poor reviews. Some howlingly bad ones in fact!
Leigh Whannell’s take on the classic monster has strayed too far away from the source material as all of the original elements that people associate with classic werewolf movies (silver bullets, full moons etc) have been scrapped.
Initial numbers from box office forecasts suggest the film would open in the $30 million range but as it stands the film will be lucky to pass $12 million this weekend from a total budget of $25 million.
On Friday the film made $4.4M on early previews which by the end of play today won’t even come close to topping this weekend’s films with Lion King along with One of Them Days outperforming this new release.
It seems a little pointless making werewolf movies without the usual tropes of what makes a werewolf a werewolf. Essentially it would be like making a Superman movie where he can’t fly or a Top Gun movie that features no planes.
January horrors are hit and miss for the most part, it’s always tricky to release films in January after the initial holiday buzz has worn off but it seems no one wanted a werewolf movie to start their new year or if they did they wanted an actual werewolf movie instead of this half-arsed depiction that strips away what we know and love about the creature and drives a no-thrill, no-fun flick which has strayed too far away from its roots for anyone to care.
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