After The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones’ performance this year, the future of the series looked as bleak as an unarmed man in stand-off with Judge Dredd. So today’s announcement that original plans for the sequel are going ahead, may well cause you to look for a misprint somewhere. Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments book series, which began in 2007 with City of Bones and expands to its sixth novel City of Heavenly Fire in 2014, is undoubtedly the next attempt to fill the void Twilight left in the teen novel-to-film market. The book series has been highly profitable and well received, both of which this year’s The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones was not.

Directed by Harald Zwart (Agent Cody Banks, The Pink Panther 2 – Yikes!), the adaptation was heavily criticised by reviewers. The general consensus being that it was unoriginal, disastrously plotted and badly adapted. However reviews do not always dictate success (look at Bay’s Transformers films) but in this case the revenue disappointed too. The film, with a budget of $60 million, made $80 million worldwide, a vastly disappointing figure to studio Constantin Films. This is not 2013’s first post-Twilight franchise hopeful to fail either, films like The Host and Beautiful Creatures similarly aimed to corner the market but could not accomplish the task. 

Still, in spite of all this negativity, Constantin is determined to make a go of a Mortal Instruments film franchise, with sequel City of Ashes. Constantin board member, Martin Moszkowicz spoke to Variety, saying, “We are analyzing exactly what went wrong, and that needs some time. We’ll go back to the drawing board, and we’ll work on the screenplay; we’ll work on the elements of the movie; and then we’ll budget it.” Some suggested what went wrong began with ‘e’ and ended with ‘verything’. Nonetheless, Constantin is not ready to give up with this series yet and is re-considering their marketing and plan for the sequel moving forward to the shooting stage next year (exact date TBA).

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