‘I, Frankenstein’ Fails To Terrify The Weekend Box Office

I, Frankenstein proved that not all January releases aren’t necessarily created equal.

Director Stuart Beattie’s take on the Frankenstein legend couldn’t compete with its box-office competition over the weekend. The $65 million action-horror hybrid watched helplessly as Ride Along, Lone Survivor, and a handful of other titles maintained their dominance.

According to the numbers at Box Office Mojo, I, Frankenstein made only $8.6 million from moviegoers from Friday to Sunday. While that number may not sound too terrible to some folks, Lionsgate was probably hoping the flick would bring home a bit more cash than it did.

Inspired by the classic novel by Mary Shelley, I, Frankenstein finds the famous monster (Aaron Eckhart) caught in a war between two clans who are desperate to unravel the secret to immortality. Since the flick is from the creators of the Underworld series, moviegoers should expect plenty of creature-on-creature tomfoolery.

Audiences with money to burn seemed more interested in a real-life military story starring Mark Wahlberg and a Kevin Hart comedy than a horror flick centered around Frankenstein. If Lionsgate hopes to break even, then they’ll have to bank on foreign markets giving them a financial hand. The film has yet to arrive overseas as of this writing.

Since genre flicks tend to make a tidy sum of cash on home video, there’s a possibility I, Frankenstein could recover on Blu-ray, DVD, and VOD. However, prospective viewers will have to look past the unsavory reviews the flick generated upon its theatrical release.

As of this writing, the movie has a Rotten Tomatoes score of five percent. This definitely isn’t working in the film’s favor, as it’s currently one of the worst-reviewed motion pictures of the year. That’s not an honor any movie wants to carry around with it these days.

“There are some clean, comic-book compositions and neat architectural interlacing, but the blinkered screenplay and indifferent performances fail to lift the eschatology and self-searching off the page,” The New York Times critic wrote in his I, Frankenstein review.

Vulture’s David Edelstein added, “Eckhart plays Frankenstein’s monster in a monotonous, teeth-gritting mode, as if someone had one gun on him and another on his family.”

While I, Frankenstein struggled to find an audience over the weekend, Ride Along and Lone Survivor continued to feed wads of cash into the Hollywood machine. The films claimed the top two spots at the box office, respectively.

Did you catch I, Frankenstein in theaters over the weekend? Do you think director Stuart Beattie’s take on the monster was as bad as the reviews suggest?