I, Frankenstein the Latest Comic Book Movie to Disappoint at the Box Office

Lionsgate's Aaron Eckhardt-starring I, Frankenstein is on pace to come in at #5 or #6 at the domestic box office this weekend, bringing in less than $8 million on its $65 million production budget. That means the movie may not even crack the top five, with Ride Along, Lone Survivor, Frozen, The Nut Job and Jack Ryan :Shadow Recruit all in line to make more than the $7.75 million Deadline is projecting for the Stuart Beattie-directed horror film. That's likely to establish it pretty firmly as the latest in a series of recent flops based on smaller comic books and graphic novels, in the company of sequels Kick-Ass 2 and RED 2 as well as the Dark Horse Comics adaptation R.I.P.D. and Sylvester Stallone's Bullet to the Head.

It wasn't all bad news for smaller comics in 2013: Two Guns opened to solid reviews and box office, and did well enough to put a sequel into development. This year, films like 300: Rise of an Empire and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For are expected to perform much better at the box office than I, Frankenstein ever was anyway, and could raise some real questions if they don't. The film, which also stars Bill Nighy and Yvonne Strahovski, has been in various stages of development since 2007, when creator Kevin Grevioux shopped the concept around, only to find that people were having a hard time getting their head around the concept. "Lakeshore didn't buy the graphic novel; there was no graphic novel to buy," Grevioux told ComicBook.com last year at New York Comic Con. "I actually sold them the screenplay that I wrote. That's how this whole thing started. The graphic novel pages I had were merely for illustrative purposes. And you have to be smart in this modern age of filmmaking when you're a content creator so that you can expand the universes you create and also take as much control of them in their nascent forms as you can. So I first brought the idea of I, Frankenstein to Lakeshore back in 2007 but they did not understand it–and this is typical of a lot of producers. When you're working with genre, they don't really understand the fantastic worlds that you create so you're going to have to help them along." He added, "So in 2007 they didn't understand it but I had other projects that I had to do first and then in 2009 is when I actually wrote the screenplay. They were the first ones to take a look at it and loved it and I had had some artwork commissioned that I was going to use later on as a graphic novel, so I augmented my pitch with that artwork and that convinced them even more that they needed to do this film."