Why The Host Failed Where Twilight Succeeded

Why The Host Failed Where Twilight Succeeded

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After the success of Twilight, Stephenie Meyer seemed unstoppable, so why did her 2013 followup The Host fail where the earlier teen series succeeded?

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Why The Host Failed Where Twilight Succeeded

Author Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight follow up The Host had a big budget, starry cast, and the famous writer’s clout going for it—so why was the movie a critical and commercial disappointment? Released in 2008, Twilight was something of a sleeper hit. Granted, the paranormal teen romance was adapted from author Stephenie Meyers’ bestselling novel saga of the same name, but the success of the book series was not necessarily expected to translate to a big screen payday.

Twilight could’ve been altered by Paramount, as it was unsure whether audiences would want a movie faithful to Meyers’ novel. Even after these plans were scrapped, original Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke claimed she only got the job because the studio producing the movie had low expectations for the franchise’s potential. Despite this, Twilight was a blockbuster hit and soon spawned a string of sequels, each of which earned hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office.

After this massive and unanticipated success, expectations were understandably sky-high for the 2013 movie adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s YA sci-fi novel The Host. Starring an up-and-coming Saoirse Ronan and screen veteran Diane Kruger, the adaptation seemed set for blockbuster success. However, despite its director having an impressive pedigree in thoughtful sci-fi fare and the genre going through a mainstream renaissance at the time, The Host performed disastrously upon release. Only a year after the final Twilight movie Breaking Dawn Part 2 made a whopping $829 million, The Host earned woeful reviews and barely recouped its considerable budget, earning $63 million despite costing $40 million. So, why couldn’t the sci-fi movie recreate the success of her earlier series?

The Twilight Zeitgeist Ended Fast

Why The Host Failed Where Twilight Succeeded

Twilight’s time as a global phenomenon was intense but brief, as tends to be the case for popular franchises aimed at teens. While the novels sold hundreds of millions of copies, the fact that they were aimed at a young adult audience meant they struggled to hold onto fans into adulthood the way the Harry Potter franchise had, and the success of older-oriented supernatural soap operas like The Vampire Diaries and True Blood cost Twilight much of its lucrative fandom as viewers grew out of the chaste melodrama. The popularity of the series may have seen each Twilight movie succeed at the box office, even the underrated Eclipse, but by the time the final film was released, Twilight’s fame was waning and its target audience was growing out of the franchise. As such, this made a second series from Meyer unappealing, especially since The Host was entirely unrelated to the supernatural drama and squarely aimed at teens.

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The Host’s Complex Convoluted Mythology

Why The Host Failed Where Twilight Succeeded

Compared to Twilight, The Host’s mythology was needlessly complicated and difficult to decipher. There were parasitic aliens who had already taken over the world before the series began. So-called “Souls” were implanted in hosts and attempting to quell a human resistance movement, and there was all manner of complicated lore that needed to be expanded on before the real story—the YA love triangle—could even begin. In stark contrast, Twilight featured vampire covens and werewolves, two breeds of movie monsters that anyone with a passing familiarity with horror conventions could understand. Sure, Twilight changed traditions of vampires and werewolves (as seen in its infamous sparkly vampires), but the series was at least changing rules that viewers understood instead of setting up an all-new and deeply confusing mythology of its own invention like The Host.

Much as Ronan made for a compelling protagonist, the actor was stuck with a role where she shared her head with another soul—or rather, another “Soul,” one of the parasitic aliens the plot centered around. Splitting her screen time with Diane Kruger, Ronan couldn’t make an impression and, similarly, Kruger had little chance to establish a rounded character, resulting in a flat story with no heroine to root for. With a simpler plot, the story may have succeeded, but The Host’s knotty mythology meant the movie was likely always doomed.

The Host Needed A Different Director (Unlike Twilight)

Twilight lucked out in hiring director Catherine Hardwicke, who gave the movie a moody color palette and grungy aesthetic that helped tone down its inherent absurdity and ground the story’s melodrama. Later sequels were less lucky, with New Moon earning worse reviews thanks to the inconsistent tone provided by Chris Weitz’s direction. However, The Host had a seemingly solid pick in Gattaca’s Andrew Niccol, whose sci-fi efforts sometimes proved thought-provoking and satirically sharp. However, Niccol also struggled to keep the absurd world-building of sci-fi stories believable, as proven by his then-recent critical failure, the Justin Timberlake-led In Time. While his chilly cerebral sci-fi resulted in some cult gems, his style was ill-suited to the high drama of a teen movie from Stephanie Meyer of Twilight. As a result of this stylistic mismatch, The Host had the dialogue of a cheesy teen drama but the cold, clinical aesthetic of a Solaris ripoff, resulting in some unintentionally funny moments and an inconsistent tone.

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The heightened dramatics might have worked with a more propulsive tone, and the thoughtful attempts to interrogate heavy themes of identity and technology could have benefitted from a more mature tone, but trying to be both at once meant that The Host could not pull off either. This was not helped by The Host’s apparent belief that it was too big to fail, with the movie’s ending featuring a cameo from Meyer’s original choice for Bella Swan Emily Browning that teased a sequel that would never come to pass. In fairness to the filmmakers, the success of Meyer’s first post-Twilight venture seemed like a sure thing at the time. However, there was still a lack of self-awareness that resulted in the movie venturing into byzantine mythology and complex lore, which is dangerous territory when assuming one film could spawn another entire franchise. While Twilight was a surprise sleeper hit that outdid the modest expectations of the studio, The Host was a classic case of doing too much too fast and putting off viewers with a complicated story and mismatched style.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/twilight-success-2013-host-failure-stephenie-meyer-movie-comparison/

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