So there was clearly plenty of potential for more rich and satisfying teenage angst.īut no petition could ever overcome one cold, hard fact: Beautiful Creatures flopped at the box office, easily overrun by a Nicholas Sparks adaptation, Safe Haven, and Bruce Willis in A Good Day to Die Hard. That pretty much continues right through the third and fourth books, Beautiful Chaos and Beautiful Redemption. Its second instalment, Beautiful Darkness, saw Ethan and Lena hounded by the latter's refusal to choose between light and dark magic. So why no Beautiful Creatures 2? The Caster Chronicles book series spawned three sequels and a spin-off focused on fan-favourites Link and Ridley, played in the movie by Mann and Rossum. There's one particularly memorable scene where Rossum's dark caster tears it up in a black lace dress, seductive and power-hungry while at the wheel of a little red sports car. It's certainly got an impressive cast, with Ehrenreich and Englert joined on screen by Viola Davis, Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson, Emmy Rossum, Margo Martindale, Thomas Mann, Kyle Gallner, Zoey Deutch and Rachel Brosnahan.Īnd its Southern Gothic twist, with lashings of Spanish moss and corseted ballgowns, is really quite gorgeous. A petition from 2018, which boasts 12,617 signatures, argued that the streamer should deliver on a follow-up television series. While some, like Time Out's Cath Clarke, dismissed it as 'a trashy Southern-fried Twilight', others were more generous in their appraisals – Betsy Sharkey at the LA Times proclaimed it to be 'an intriguing, intelligent enigma'.Īnd the movie does have its fanbase, one that's been steadily growing since the movie found a new home on Netflix. It was one of the more favourably reviewed YA cash-ins. The two seem fatefully, somewhat inexplicably, drawn to each other – even as their romance threatens to send Lena down a dark and dangerous road. The Edward is Lena (Alice Englert), a new student in his class who’s actually from a family of 'casters' ('witch' is a rather gauche word in this universe). The Bella of this story is Ethan (Alden Ehrenreich), a puppy dog-hearted jock dead set on leaving his hometown of Gatlin, South Carolina.

One of the trend's very last manifestations of the era was Beautiful Creatures, based on the first instalment of the Caster Chronicles series, written by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. That's not to say that they were any good, but they were plentiful. These were the golden years of Young Adult adaptations, Beastly, I Am Number Four and Red Riding Hood to name but a few. Everyone's hungry for the next Twilight – ravenous, in fact, for moody teenagers afflicted by supernatural conditions, falling wildly and madly in love while they battle generic forces of evil.

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