In 2006, Silent Hill got its own live-action adaptation and the movie was mainly trashed by critics upon release; however, Silent Hill managed to break $100 million worldwide at the box office so it’s not particularly surprising that a sequel was released. Six years later, Silent Hill: Revelation was released to little buzz and fanfare, and it didn’t help that the rotten tomatoes score ended up with a horrid 10%. Worse of all, the sequel bombed at the box office. Silent Hill: Revelation managed to recoup its $20 million production budget back, but the feature failed to make a splash in the overall box office. So, what happened? The first Silent Hill wasn’t a smashing success at the box office; however, the video game adaptation did garner enough interest to make over $100 million worldwide. Let’s dive deeper into the reasoning behind Silent Hill: Revelation’s failure at the box office.
The First Silent Hill Killed Any Future Interest
The first Silent Hill wasn’t bad. In fact, it’s better than a good portion of video game-inspired movies. The visuals are high quality and that scene of pyramid head ripping off someone’s skin is genuinely terrifying, but the movie is kind of bland in execution with a bad ending. Arguably the two most important moments in the film are the beginning and end. If an audience isn’t invested within those first precious minutes then the likelihood of someone connecting with a movie as it progresses is slim. However, a bad ending can ruin a good movie. It makes the entire journey that you invested in for the past two hours worthless and often frustrating, thus leaving a bad taste in your mouth. Of course, it’s important that the middle portion of a movie is good too; however, the beginning and end stick out in people’s minds more often than not. There’s a reason why executives and producers in Hollywood pay close attention to the first ten pages of a screenplay. If they aren’t invested by page 10 then they’ll toss the script in the trash because they understand that a film rarely gets better if the starting point isn’t good. The video game adaptation does a great job of capturing the mood and style of its source material. It’s clear that Christophe Gans really cared about this feature and his level of craftsmanship helps elevate the film. Unfortunately, the film was likely too faithful to the video game as many of the audiences didn’t understand what was going on in the movie. When the mystery was eventually revealed, many audiences and critics thought the ending was stupid and nonsensical. Since that ending left on a sour note to many of the paying customers, audiences likely shrugged when the announcement of a sequel was confirmed. Despite Game of Thrones being a hot commodity at the time, the star power of Kit Harrington wasn’t enough to draw more people into the film.
There Was Barely Any Marketing for Silent Hill: Revelation
One of the ways that you can tell whether a movie is bad or not is how hard a film is marketed to the public. Of course, this reasoning isn’t always sound as there’s plenty of great movies that didn’t get any love from studios, but it’s usually a telling sign when a studio doesn’t advertise a movie. That’s the case with Silent Hill: Revelation. By no means is this on the level of House of the Dead or Bloodrayne; however, the horror feature is a boring mess that has a few effective scares here and there. Adding the 3D gimmick to the film likely helped seal its fate. Avatar made the gimmick one of the hottest trends in movies; however, that was back in 2009. In 2012, the 3D aspect was tired and not much of a trend people cared about. The key thing is that most live-action features that were in 3D ended up being terrible. There hasn’t been another 3D movie that has matched the buzz or quality of the James Cameron film. Silent Hill: Revelation snuck into theaters and did better than it had any right too. However, the lack of notable stars in front and behind the camera, and the terrible critical reception likely had Sony bulk over the possibilities of this film being a bigger success. Mix in the fact that Argo was the big movie of the month and Paranormal Activity 4 satisfied audiences who were looking for a good scare on Halloween; Silent Revelation was realistically doomed from the beginning. It’s highly unlikely that a sequel will be made at this point; however, in the world of movies, never say never.
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