Disney’s content purge has knocked subscribers and creatives alike for six, with many up in arms at a vast array of film and television titles being erased from existence, some of which may never be seen again. Every cloud has a silver lining, though, and in this instance it’s time to say good riddance to the abhorrent Artemis Fowl.
On paper, the literary adaptation possessed enough potential to seem as if it stood a chance of finding success, only for the Mouse House to seemingly realize it had a streaming cinematic turd on its hands. Multi-time Academy Award nominee Kenneth Branagh directed the $125 million fantasy, and he’d more than proven himself as a dab hand at multiple genres.
The source material had a huge built-in fandom who’d been desperate to see the title hero get the feature-length treatment for years, while the stacked cast roped in Colin Farrell, Judi Dench, Josh Gad, Nonso Anozie, and many others to lent support to Ferdia Shaw’s title hero. However, there were early signs that Artemis Fowl was heading straight for disaster.
Originally scheduled for a theatrical release in August of 2019, it was pushed back to May 2020, and ultimately tossed onto Disney Plus later that summer. That seemed suspicious when many other Disney-backed movies were being delayed and held back to hit the big screen in the face of the pandemic, an outcome that also made it the single most expensive Disney Plus exclusive at that point in time.
It soon became clear why Artemis Fowl didn’t take a crack at the box office when it scored an eight percent Rotten Tomatoes approval rating, a 20 percent audience score, and ended up as only the 18th most-watched streaming-only film of 2020, cultivating a well-earned reputation as one of the worst big budget studio flicks of the modern age into the bargain.
People are going to miss Willow and The Princess, but this infamous disaster is one we can all agree is better off being forgotten.