19-21. Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker (2006), I Am Number Four (2011), and Beastly (2011)

Alex Pettyfer, the English actor best known as Magic Mike’s Kid, is the reigning world champion of failed YA adaptation franchises. After starting out as a child model, Pettyfer made his big-screen debut at age 15 as the title character in the teen-spy flick Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker, having passed on starring in another failed YA franchise-starter, Eragon. (Fittingly, his only previous acting credit was as the lead in an ITV adaptation of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the 1857 novel that launched a popular, proto-YA 19th-century sub-genre of stories about English boarding schools.) Stormbreaker, which was based on the first in a series of books by Anthony Horowitz, made a whopping $677,646 in the United States, with a combined worldwide gross that came out to just a little over half of its $40 million budget; plans for a series of sequels—already in development, with Pettyfer contracted to star—were immediately scrapped. Five years later, Pettyfer returned to the YA franchise game with the one-two of I Am Number Four and Beastly, released just weeks apart in early 2011. The former—directed by D.J. Caruso (Disturbia, Eagle Eye), produced by Michael Bay, and based on a series pseudonymously co-written by notorious memoir hoaxster James Frey—starred Pettyfer as an alien who is sent away to Earth to live incognito after the destruction of his home planet. The latter—a modern-day twist on Beauty And The Beast, based on the first in a cycle of books by Alex Flinn—cast Pettyfer as a very unconvincingly hideous Beast. Both made modest profits and were then quickly forgotten.



Why they didn’t take off: Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker, I Am Number Four, and Beastly have two things in common: They all star Alex Pettyfer, and they’re all bad movies. And though Magic Mike would prove that Pettyfer could be good when used right, all three movies—based on series with generic concepts and limited audience recognition—stake more on his hunky good looks than anything like acting ability. (This is especially problematic in Beastly, in which his character is supposed to be repulsive, but looks like Alex Pettyfer with scars and funky facial tattoos.) At least I Am Number Four has the benefit of some cool-looking camerawork from longtime Guillermo Del Toro cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, though that isn’t exactly the kind of thing that gets butts into seats. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]