After being singled out as an example of the audience’s growing fatigue with supernatural romances, adaptations of teen-oriented novels, and the increasingly tired “Chosen One” formula, the would-be Mortal Instruments franchise has been put on indefinite hold. This summer’s The Mortal Instruments: City Of Bones earned around $65 million internationally—just barely enough to recoup its budget (not counting marketing), and certainly not enough to justify immediately jumping into filming its planned sequel, City Of Ashes. In a press release announcing what it’s optimistically framing as a delay, Constantin Film said it was pushing back production to “make sure to draw on the full potential of the franchise”—knowing that, right now, some people might see Mortal Instruments as a rather ordinary young-adult franchise, hardly special. But, if it can overcome these incredible obstacles, perhaps its true powers will be revealed in the sort of story that everyone’s seen some version of a half-dozen times already, and so don’t really need another one right now, thanks.
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