There’s nothing inherently wrong with selling a movie almost entirely on the back of one aspect above all else, but it definitely helps if the rest of the moving parts are strong enough to support it. Unfortunately for Renfield, though, the heavily-hyped performance of Nicolas Cage as Dracula was about the only thing that delivered the goods.
Director Chris McKay had done a sterling job of ramping up the hype in the buildup to the horror comedy’s release, with the trailers promising a blood-splattered and offbeat hybrid of stomach-churning gore and laugh out loud hilarity, only for his latest feature to crater at the box office right out of the gate.
Renfield could only scrape together an awful $7 million in its domestic opening weekend, and it’s already gone down as one of the biggest bombs of the year despite only releasing three and a half weeks ago, with Universal dropping it onto digital and on-demand in double-quick time in an effort to recoup those losses after the $65 million flick limped to a measly $23 million in ticket sales.
However, the rush towards reappraisal is already underway, with Redditors stating the case for Renfield deserving much better than a mediocre Rotten Tomatoes score of 57 percent to go along with its commercial catastrophe. Cage is on fire as the scenery-chewing antagonist, but there’s always a sense that the film is trying too hard to become a cult classic on purpose, a status that can almost never be precision-engineered.
There were high hopes, but in the end, Renfield ended up mimicking its fanged villain by erupting into a ball of flames and being left as nothing more than the smoldering embers of what should have been a top-tier slice of deranged genre-bending fun.