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As a studio, Blumhouse is the most hit or miss entity making movies active today. They have produced some stellar movies like Freaky and the 2018 Halloween reboot and at the same time produced Fantasy Island, Thriller, and Ouija. Because of the heights the studio can hit, a movie like Firestarter had the potential of being a great timely reimagining of the classic source material but really it just ends up falling flat.
Firestarter is a book (and 1984 theatrical adaptation) about the autonomy and agency that a person gains as they progress through the stages of life into adolescence as well as the inhibitions that come from standards set by those around them. This is explored with the manifesting paranormal abilities that are made more pronounced by attempting to fall into the roles established by people in her life. It is very similar to X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga which came out in the same year (Firestarter the book came out in September of 1980 while Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s run on X-Men for this story was from January to October of 1980).
The problem with this latest adaptation is that it seems like it wants to be more like a tentpole superhero franchise than a meditative look on the themes that made its predecessors popular. Rather than trying to make a movie that takes the themes of the original and updates them to the modern era like The Invisible Man did in 2020, Firestarter is more interested in trying make something with mass appeal without saying anything at all. If the budget it was working with was in the $50-75 million range that would be somewhat understandable but at $12 million the studio would have been better off looking for a director who had a vision for the material.
Ultimately the biggest sin the movie commits is that it falls flat in nearly every aspect. Nothing about the movie is interesting to the point that the actors even seem somewhat disinterested in the events of the movie they are in. It is laughable and feels more like the 2015 Fantastic Four movie in so much as it was only made to keep the rights to the material without any regard for quality.
The writing was on the wall about this movie’s quality and the utter lack of faith that the studio had in it. First, the movie had very little ad spend outside of a theatrical trailer that ran before some movies in theaters. Blumhouse is not Sony where they can promote a movie within an inch of its life and write it off for taxes as a loss (Morbius) so when a movie is not going to do well, it is better to just rip the band-aid off and dump it into theaters. Second, unlike Universal’s other hybrid streaming/theatrical release this year (Marry Me), the announcement about it going to Peacock was buried and not widely explained to audiences. Third, the review embargo did not lift until Thursday and usually when a studio does not want people to know how bad a movie is, not letting critics tell people until the day it comes out is a good way to do that. Finally, they dumped it out in a poor release date which is basically setting it up for failure. While it may be marketed as releasing on Friday the 13th, the real reason it came out when it did was so the failure of the movie would be overshadowed by Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’s second week box office. Either it holds steady and that’s a story that will be discussed or it will precipitously drop off and that will be discussed. Regardless, the failure of Firestarter at the box office will be the top story.
Firestarter is not worth the time to watch, it is not worth the money to see it in a theater, and honestly the best thing that could be said about the movie is that it is a little over an hour and a half long. If one has Peacock and does not want to watch Halloween II, Halloween III (honestly an underrated movie), the original Firestarter from 1984, Night of the Living Dead, Knock Knock, Train to Busan, Sinister, or any number of the other low budget horror movies on the streamer, maybe consider downloading Shudder and moving through their originals and classics in horror before watching Firestarter.
Final Rating: 4/10
