These are dark times for The Darkest Minds.
Over the first weekend of August 2018, the YA series turned hopeful film franchise was
introduced to moviegoers by 20th Century Fox - and audiences were not interested.
Released in 3,127 theaters, the movie was met with a resounding splat at the box office,
earning only around $6 million domestically and not faring much better overseas.
It's enough to mark the movie as having one of the worst opening weekends ever for a release
of that size - so you can probably say goodbye to any adaptation of the series' second book.
What happened to make this adaptation fail where others have soared?
Why did The Darkest Minds bomb at the box office?
Follow our signal - we have the answers that you seek.
Colorful characters
Considering how few people went to see it, it might be best to recap what The Darkest
Minds even is.
Based on a book series by Alexandra Bracken, the film centers on a near-future apocalypse
in which the vast majority of children in the US contract a mysterious disease.
While the illness kills most people, the lucky survivors are gifted with immense powers,
with their eyes glowing a certain color depending on what they can do.
Greens are very intelligent, blues are telekinetic, and golds can control electricity.
The most powerful are the oranges, who can control minds, and the reds, who control fire.
The powerful survivors are seen as such a threat that they're ripped away from their
families and placed into internment camps, with the most powerful kids either being enlisted
by authorities as government enforcers or outright killed.
The main character is Ruby Daly, a powerful orange who disguises herself as a green for
her own survival.
When her true nature is exposed, she flees her camp with the help of a sympathetic doctor
and sets off with other runaways in search of a safe haven.
Muddled marketing
So the plot sounds simple, right?
Good kids with powers on the run from bad adults.
But the movie's marketing team didn't manage to convey any of that.
Instead, ads made the story look like "a Nicholas Sparks adaptation meets the climax of Avengers:
Infinity War".
A more action-oriented trailer made it seem like the cheapest X-Men movie yet.
In all the marketing materials, the premise is under explained, only resonating if you're
already familiar with the source material.
It raises the question: Who are these promos meant to attract?
Whatever the campaign was going for - it didn't work.
Give it some star power
When it comes to this movie's cast, even the casual viewer is probably going to recognize
the likes of Mandy Moore, Bradley Whitford, and Gwendoline Christie.
The problem is, these recognizable actors aren't the movie's leads.
Instead, the heavy promotional lifting for The Darkest Minds was left to the younger
kids in the cast, none of whom have really established themselves as marketable draws
at this point in their careers, despite their talents.
The closest the film has to a young breakout star is Amandla Stenberg as main character
Ruby, evoking memories of her turn as Rue in The Hunger Games.
But as far as name actors go, that's it.
This is like if they tried to sell the Jumanji sequel with the actors who played the students
instead of Dwayne Johnson and company.
When it comes to box office performance, the lack of familiar faces certainly didn't help.
Murky action
As several reviews for The Darkest Minds have pointed out, the movie didn't impress when
it comes to its action sequences, which have been described as incoherent.
The Darkest Minds is directed by Jennifer Yuh Nelson, an Emmy award-winning storyboard
artist and filmmaker who was previously up for an Oscar for directing Kung Fu Panda 2.
Though she's worked in animation for decades now, The Darkest Minds is only her third feature
as director, and her very first live-action project.
While the movie's premise has drawn comparisons to the X-Men movies, The Darkest Minds can't
hold a candle to that franchise's often inventive, adrenaline-pumping set pieces.
A version of the X-Men with only the social commentary and none of the spectacle is…
well, kind of a lousy version of the X-Men.
A lack of action-packed sequences makes it harder to sell the movie to audiences wanting
superhero-style thrills, contributing to what made this project such a weak draw at the
box office, and made so many people head over to catch the fifth weekend run of Ant-Man
and the Wasp instead.
Cut-rate
Other reviews of The Darkest Minds have described the movie as having the look of a CW pilot
which, while charming, have a tendency to look pretty cheap.
Put simply, The Darkest Minds is not the kind of production that is flattered by a big-screen
presentation.
With a reported budget of $34 million, The Darkest Minds clearly didn't have a lot of
money to throw around, leaving the movie looking every bit like the inexpensive production
it is.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but why trek out to the movie theater when you can
pull up some straight-to-Netflix silliness that looks just as good, or even better?
Twilight of YA
One of Hollywood's biggest trends in the last decade has been the explosion of adaptations
of young adult properties from the well-known to the unknown.
You know the ones we're talking about.
"Since when do vampires like baseball?"
"Well—"
After the titanic success of the Harry Potter movies, school bookshelves were picked clean
by industry producers, all looking for the next big property that the kids can't stop
talking about.
But while that trend was once dominant, it's now clearly receding, which makes The Darkest
Minds feel shockingly late to the party.
Worse, it has nothing new to say.
The darkest legacy
While The Darkest Minds is facing a terrible opening weekend with abysmal reviews, the
actual long-term damage is not quite as bad as you might think.
Given time, the movie may actually end up making money.
With its small budget in mind, there actually is still an avenue for The Darkest Minds to
make money through home media sales and syndication.
In the long run, that's a success.
Unfortunately, despite ending with a crushing sequel hook that leaves a main character's
life in the balance, the odds of seeing The Darkest Minds continue forward on the big
screen are slim.
But things could have gone a lot worse.
This story may seem over, but it's not necessarily a tragedy.
Something tells us that this talented cast at least will walk away from this soft opening
relatively unscathed.