Inside Film

'The Goldfinch' was one of the worst openings ever for Warner Bros – so why do literary bestsellers rarely make decent movies?

The film adaptation of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which is out this week, is yet another casualty in the long line of best-selling books that fail to translate onto the big screen, writes Geoffrey Macnab

Thursday 26 September 2019 20:11 BST
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Nicole Kidman as Mrs Barbour and Ansel Elgort as Theo Decker in ‘The Goldfinch’
Nicole Kidman as Mrs Barbour and Ansel Elgort as Theo Decker in ‘The Goldfinch’

When renowned cinematographer Roger Deakins was shooting new movie The Goldfinch (adapted from Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel) in Amsterdam, the Dutch crew was astounded by his extreme perfectionism and attention to the minutest detail. Deakins insisted on all the low-wattage bulbs on one of the most famous bridges in the city being replaced because he needed more light. He went to great lengths to make sure the fake snow seen fleetingly from a hotel window fell over the city in just the right way.

You won’t find many more picturesque films this year than The Goldfinch, but that hasn’t helped it at the box office. “The Goldfinch bombs hard”, “one of the worst openings ever for Warner Bros”, “faces losses of up to $50m (£40m)” and “Goldfinch heads for crash landing” were just some of the headlines that followed the film’s US release, earlier this month.

The film, which has the backing of both Warner Bros and Amazon Studios, was released on over 2,500 screens, but after its opening weekend, posted revenues of only $2.6m on a reported budget of over $40m. Critics savaged it. It was, according to one reviewer, “a lifeless film that doesn’t consist of scenes so much as it does an awkward jumble of other, smaller problems stacked on top of each other like kids inside a trench coat”. Another called it “utterly flummoxing” and “completely fake”, more like “a Pinterest page or a piece of fan art” than a proper movie.

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