In March, Brendan Fraser won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in the drama The Whale (theatrical release April 27). It capped the actor’s comeback, who has fought his way back into the spotlight with character roles in recent years. 15 years ago, Fraser was the man for the family-friendly blockbusters. The Mummy was his big hit and Inkheart would kick off his next fantasy series in 2008. The film is on TV today.
Inkheart is based on the bestseller by Cornelia Funke
The first novel in Cornelia Funke’s Inkworld trilogy was published in 2003 and also made waves among English-speaking readers. Brendan Fraser and Eliza Bennett star in the film, playing bookworms Mortimer “Mo” Folchart and his 12-year-old daughter Meggie. Father and daughter can bring the characters from their beloved books to life by reading aloud. But this extraordinary gift is not without danger: Whenever a fictional character emerges from the pages, a real person must disappear into them.
Warner Bros.
inkheart
When the two go to an antiquarian bookshop again, Mo hears voices he hasn’t heard in years. And when he finds the book they came from, a chill runs down his spine: Mo has been looking for this very book called Inkheart, with its illustrations of medieval castles and strange creatures, since Meggie was three years old. At that time her mother Resa disappeared into this mystical world.
With the help of the book, Mo Resa now wants to find and free her, but his plan is thwarted by the evil Inkheart villain Capricorn (Andy Serkis), who kidnaps Meggie and required Mo to bring other evil characters from the book to life. In order to save his daughter and banish the book characters to their ancestral world, Mo asks a motley group from the real world and from the magic realm for help: together they set out to create order, fearless and at great risk.
Despite the star cast, the fantasy film was a huge failure
The cast of the fantasy film reads as impressive today as it did then. In addition to Brendan Fraser, Inkheart features future Marvel actor Paul Bettany, Oscar winner Helen Mirren, Harry Potter teacher Jim Broadbent, and Gollum himself, Andy Serkis.
But that wasn’t enough. The Inkheart adaptation, plagued by clichés and lifelessness, fell through with criticism and at the box office as well. With a budget of around 60 million dollars, the film was cheaper than other fantasy flops of the time (The Golden Compass, for example, cost 180 million dollars). Inkheart also only took in a meager 62 million dollars worldwide, of which only 17 million in the USA. To get anywhere near black, it would have had to be more like double the budget.
This is how the Inkheart trilogy ended in cinemas before it really began.
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