![]() His world turns on a revisionist axis, aspiring to a critical take on familiar fairy-tale lore informed more by the violence and capriciousness of Hans Christian Andersen’s storybook than its squeaky-clean Disneyfied bastardizations. ![]() With initial studio Universal having lost interest after putting the property on hold for nearly a decade, it’s in the standardless streaming wilds that Chainani’s text is free to be its worst self. As this narrative advances out of the YA-industrial complex and into the harsher environment of general scrutiny, however, a whole curriculum’s worth of faults become visible to an audience not so readily pandered to, who want for more than worn-out teen-lit tropes to fill some inner content maw. And going by the bank ledgers, they did it Chainani’s hexalogy repeatedly topped best-seller lists, brought him fabulous wealth, and got a green light for the film adaptation that certifies a mere popular book as an official Thing. Novelist Soman Chainani and writer-director Paul Feig – a man doing his darnedest to erase all memory that he once possessed the power to make us laugh – set out to reproduce that generational smash with another tale of misfit teens spirited away to a magical cliffside academy weirdly attached to its flawed organizational system.
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