We take a look back at the forgettable, would-be-franchise starter, I Am Number Four.
One of the most forgettable teen fantasy movies of the 2010s had to have been D.J. Caruso’s would-be franchise starter, I Am Number Four. In the wake of the Twilight series, Hollywood was high on teen fantasy (a genre that has now mostly been consigned to streaming), and this promised to be a doozy. It was based on a series of young adult fantasy novels called The Lorien Legacies, which were written by an author named Pittacus Lore, who, turned out to be a pseudonym for disgraced author James Frey (among others), whose career flamed out once it was revealed that his addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was largely fabricated.
However, in this pre-cancellation era, Frey’s fall from grace was quickly forgiven by Hollywood, who sensed this could be the next huge franchise. A young actor named Alex Pettyfer, who Hollywood was hot on at the time, was signed to play the handsome young lead, an alien masquerading as an earthling, who Timothy Olyphant’s Henri protects. The movie was produced by Michael Bay, financed by Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks, and for a while, seemed like a potential blockbuster. Yet, like many other movies in the teen fantasy genre, its box office was mediocre, and the series was quickly abandoned. So what happened? In this special episode of WTF Happened to this Movie, we get into how the series of books was controversial in the lead-up to the movie, how Pettyfer’s press tour was a disaster, and how the film itself simply couldn’t capture the teen audience it sought. It was only one of many franchises that never made it, including The Golden Compass, City of Ember, Divergent, and so many more. Why were studios so insistent on making the teen fantasy genre so huge when the movies failed to connect?
