Suffering through a tortured production, bombing at the box office, getting torn apart by critics, and roasted by fans are four things that no movie wants to experience individually, so you can only imagine how the minds behind Seventh Son felt when the infamous fantasy flop suffered the ignominy of ticking off all four of those unwanted boxes.
Blockbuster adaptations of fantastical literary source material were still all the rage when the feature-length version of Joseph Delaney’s The Spook’s Apprentice entered development, but after being delayed for two years when the principal visual effects company went bust – which caused Warner Bros. to drop the project and forced Legendary to shift it to Universal – the fad was on its last legs.
Still, a cast featuring Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, Ben Barnes, Kit Harington, Alicia Vikander, and Djimon Honsou should hypothetically be enough to generate at least a little bit of interest, especially when a price tag said to be as high as $110 million promised at least a shred of imaginative world-building and spectacular magical set pieces.
Instead, Seventh Son wound up losing an estimated $85 million after tanking in theaters, while respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of 12 and 34 percent cast an even larger shadow over its mere existence. It ranks as one of the heftiest flops in history, then, but apparently still holds some sway over streaming subscribers.
Per FlixPatrol, the awful Seventh Son has risen from the depths of obscurity yet again to become one of the top-ranked titles on the iTunes global charts, and we’re struggling to think of a justifiable reason as to why.