Brooke Bunny
Despite the first film’s failure, production will resume on “The Mortal Instruments : City of Ashes” in 2014, Constantin film tells The Hollywood Reporter.
The shingle slammed the breaks on the film after this year’s “Mortal Instruments : City of Bones” failed to attract admirable numbers at the box-office. The film, the first in a planned trilogy of films based on the books by Cassandra Clare, opened to about $14m in it’s first five-day weekend and pocketed about $31m domestically. But Sony Screen Gems, who released the film stateside, had also put up $60m in marketing and publicity dollars.
Martin Moszkowicz, Constantin Film’s head of film and TV, said Clare’s fan base had reacted positively to the first movie and demand more. As such, they’re going to deliver on their promise to tell the rest of the Shadowhunter saga.
“The fan response, from the blogosphere and the thousands of mails we have received, has encouraged us to keep going,” Moszkowicz told The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s been overwhelmingly positive, in contrast to some other YA titles.”
Constantin are analyzing what they did wrong with the first film, said Maszkowicz. “…Particularly with the positioning and marketing — and what changes we have to make. We are working with a great group of people to reposition the franchise [for City of Ashes].”
Maszkowkitz says the marketing campaign may be to blame, in that it only targeted teenage girls.
“The readers of Mortal Instruments are older than you might think,” he said. “That may have been one issue in our marketing, that we focused too much on a very young audience segment.”
While changes are expected to be made in terms of cast and crew before filming begins, it was previously reported that Sigourney Weaver had joined the cast of “City of Ashes”.
