With the intention of launching a lucrative film franchise, Screen Gems announced in 2010, via Variety, that they would produce the movie version of Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, the first novel in the series. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones debuted in theaters in August 2013. Filming on the second movie, City of Ashes, which was supposed to begin in September 2013, was postponed until 2014. After the first movie was a failure, the series was finally canceled.

In The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, Clary Fray (Lily Collins), a New York City adolescent encounters the Shadowhunters, including Jace (Jamie Campbell Bower), who help her fight back against the evil threatening her mother. Clary must also learn about her own origins and her family’s past throughout the film. Rotten Tomatoes gave The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones an approval rating of 14% and notes that the movie “borrows ingredients from seemingly every fantasy franchise of the last 30 years—but can’t seem to figure out what to do with them." Here’s what went wrong with the franchise and how it was eventually redeemed.

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City of Bones Suffered Pacing Issues

     Screen Gems

With a running time of two hours and ten minutes, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones was a rather lengthy film — unheard of in the mid-2000s. This led to an odd combination of rushing certain sequences and spending too long in others, which meant that exposition and unimportant moments received too much time while other crucial parts received insufficient time. The Telegraph reviewer Robbie Collin said, “the plot is an incomprehensible tangle of dead ends and recaps, and afterwards you [realize] only two things have stuck: the story’s countless unsubtle borrowings from very recent pop culture… and a brief aside in which we learn one of the earliest demon-hunters was Johann Sebastian Bach.” It may be somewhat intimidating to adapt something, especially when there is a dedicated following and fanbase already established, and this movie suffered because of the lack of dedication to the source material. The film did so bad, it made multiple lists of the worst book-to-movie adaptations, including earning a number two spot on Loud and Clear Reviews’ list of The 5 Worst Book Adaptations in Film History in 2020.

Other YA Films Were Dominating

Young Adult (YA) franchises such as, Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games were all highly popular at the time the City of Bones movie was produced. It seemed logical to attempt to adapt the elements of these previous films’ success to this movie. Especially considering how well the previous book to movie adaptations have done in the past. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones received harsh criticism, with some dubbing it a Twilight knockoff and complaining that it lacked a distinctive character to distinguish it apart from the rest. Stephanie Merry of The Washington Post went so far as to say the film was, “overly long, complicated and, even by teen romance standards, cringe-worthy in its cheesiness.” Sadly, The Mortal Instruments lost the distinctive innovative plot that other young adult movies of the age possessed.

The Mortal Instruments Television Success

     Freeform

Luckily for fans of Cassandra Clare’s books, in October 2014, it was confirmed that The Mortal Instruments would be coming back…but as a television series. Martin Moszkowicz of Constantin Film told The Hollywood Reporter, “There was so much from the book that we had to leave out of the Mortal Instruments film. In the series, we’ll be able to go deeper and explore this world in greater detail and depth.” Shadowhunters starring Katherine McNamara as Clary Fray and Dominic Sherwood as Jace Wayland ran from 2016 through 2019 on Freeform. The Executive Vice President of Programming and Development at Freeform, Karey Burke, was quoted by Deadline as saying that “ultimately we just couldn’t make the economics work” as the reason for the shows’ cancelation. Burke continued, “We were very happy creatively with it. They delivered what the fans wanted.” Shadowhunters received 23 awards nominations and 13 awards wins, including a 2019 People’s Choice Award for Favorite Sci-Fi/Fantasy Show. Obviously, whatever they did differently in comparison to the film worked and The Mortal Instruments franchise was redeemed.