The novel's film rights were sold to Warner Bros. and RatPac Entertainment in July 2014, with ICM Partners brokering the deal. Two years later, Crowley was hired to direct the film adaptation, and Elgort was selected to portray the lead role. Most of the remaining cast joined from October 2017 to January 2018. Filming began in New York City in January 2018 and moved to Albuquerque in April 2018 for the rest of the production.
The Goldfinch premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival and was theatrically released in the United States on September 13, 2019, by Warner Bros. Pictures. It was a box-office bomb, only grossing less than $10 million against a production budget between $44–49million, with estimated losses for the studio as high as $50million, and received generally negative reviews that criticised the plot and narrative, though the cinematography and performances received praise. Donna Tartt reportedly hated the adaptation to the point of firing her longtime agent over it, and making it clear she would not sell the rights to any of her work for films again.
Plot
Thirteen-year-old Theodore Decker's mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In the aftermath of the explosion, a dying man urges him to take a painting—The Goldfinch—and his engraved ring. Theo is placed into foster care with the Barbours, the family of his best friend Andy. Theo becomes close to Mrs. Barbour, who encourages his interest in antiques and art.
It is revealed that Theo and his mother were supposed to see Theo's school principal that day because the school said he and classmate Tom Cable had been smoking cigarettes. They were early, so his mother took Theo to the museum on the day of the explosion. Theo blames himself for his mother's death.
Theo locates the antiques shop of James "Hobie" Hobart, whose partner Welton "Welty" Blackwell (the dying man from the museum) gave the ring to Theo to return. Hobie allows Theo to visit Pippa, Welty’s niece who was injured in the bombing, and the children bond before Pippa is sent to live with her aunt in Texas. Andy hints that his parents are considering adopting Theo. However, Theo's estranged father Larry, claiming to be newly sober, arrives with his girlfriend Xandra to relocate Theo to Las Vegas. Theo brings The Goldfinch and keeps it hidden.
In Las Vegas, Theo befriends Boris, a Ukrainian classmate who introduces him to drugs and alcohol. Larry ends up in gambling debt and tries to have Theo transfer his education fund to a banking account but ultimately fails.
After Theo and Boris take LSD, Theo learns that Larry was killed in a drunk-driving crash. When Xandra berates him for his apparently apathetic response to his father's death, Theo runs away to New York, taking Xandra's dog Popper and the painting. Theo tries to convince Boris to come with him, but Boris kisses him and runs away. Hobie allows Theo to live with him.
Eight years later, Theo has made Hobie’s shop successful, selling his restored antiques. He runs into Andy's older brother Platt, who reveals that Andy and their father were killed in a boating accident. Theo visits the ailing Mrs. Barbour and reconnects with her daughter Kitsey. Reeve, a disgruntled art dealer, confronts Theo for selling him a fake. Having deduced that Theo stole The Goldfinch, Reeve accuses him of using it as collateral to finance his shop. Unbeknownst to anyone else, Theo keeps the wrapped painting in a storage locker.
Theo becomes engaged to Andy's younger sister Kitsey, but harbors a secret love for Pippa, who now lives in London with her boyfriend Everett. Theo catches Kitsey cheating on him with Tom Cable, but they remain engaged, as Theo is close to Mrs. Barbour and Kitsey is permissive toward his drug habit. Theo tells Hobie the truth about selling his restorations as “real” forgeries. Pippa visits Theo and they confess their feelings for each other, but she tearfully rejects him, citing the instability caused by their shared childhood trauma.
Seeking drugs at a bar, Theo is reunited with Boris, who reveals he had stolen The Goldfinch from Theo years prior and had used it as collateral to finance his criminal career, before it was then in turn stolen from him. After a visit from Reeve, a heartbroken Hobie confronts Theo for the theft and loss of The Goldfinch.
At Theo's and Kitsey's engagement party, Boris arrives with a plan to recover The Goldfinch. Theo accompanies him to Amsterdam, where Boris seizes the painting at gunpoint, but they are ambushed by another pair of criminals. Boris kills one of them but is shot. Theo is forced to kill the other assailant, while another man escapes with the painting.
Theo tries to die by suicide in his hotel room, but is rescued by Boris. Boris explains that he called in a tip to the police about the painting's location, and that during the subsequent raid, the authorities recovered the painting as well as other stolen art, including a Rembrandt. Boris persuades Theo that it was all for the greater good.
In July 2014, film rights to the novel were sold to Warner Bros. Pictures and RatPac Entertainment with ICM Partners brokering the deal.[7] Two years later, John Crowley was hired to direct the film adaptation.[8] In August 2017, Warner Bros. finalized a deal with Amazon Studios to co-finance the adaptation, where Amazon would invest in more than a third of the project's budget and obtain streaming rights to the picture on its Prime service, while Warner Bros. would distribute the film in theaters worldwide.[9]
Footage from the film was first shown at CinemaCon on April 2, 2019.[25] The first official images were released on May 28, 2019,[26] as well as the first official teaser poster of the film.[27] The first official trailer was released on May 29, 2019.[28] About six months prior to its release, following test screenings, Warner Bros. knew the film would possibly perform poorly and in turn "dramatically" trimmed their prospective marketing plan.[4]
The Goldfinch premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2019.[29] It was released in cinemas the United States on September 13, 2019, after previously being set for October 11.[30][31]
Reception
Box office
The Goldfinch grossed $5.3million in the United States and Canada, and $4.1million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $9.4million, against a production budget of around $45million.[6]
In the United States and Canada, the film was released alongside Hustlers and was originally projected to gross $5–8million from 2,542 cinemas in its opening weekend.[32] However, after making just $870,000 on its first day, estimates were lowered to below $3million. It went on to debut to just $2.6million, the sixth worst-saturated opening of all time for a film playing on over 2,500 screens.[5][33] Following its poor opening, many publications had already labeled the film a box-office bomb and estimated it would lose as much as $50million ($25–30million for Warner Bros. and $16–18million for Amazon Studios).[34][4] The film plunged 71% in its second weekend to $770,000.[35]
Critical response
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 25% based on 228 reviews with an average rating of 4.6/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Beautifully filmed yet mostly inert, The Goldfinch mishandles its source material, flattening a complex narrative into a largely uninvolving disappointment."[36] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 40 out of 100, based on 41 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[37] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.[5]
A.O. Scott, writing for the New York Times, said the film "looks and sounds like a movie without quite being one. It's more like a Pinterest page or a piece of fan art, the record of an enthusiasm that is, to the outside observer, indistinguishable from confusion."[5]Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called it "a botch job for the ages" and said it "appears to be adapting the Cliff’s Notes version of the book instead of the book itself, producing an unplayable series of scene snippets".[38]
Related Research Articles
Plan B Entertainment, Inc., more commonly known as Plan B, is an American production company founded in November in 2001 by Brad Pitt, Brad Grey, Kristin Hahn and Jennifer Aniston. The company first signed with Warner Bros. as a replacement for Brad Grey Pictures, a company operated by Brad Grey. In 2005, after Pitt and Aniston divorced, Grey became the CEO of Paramount Pictures and Pitt became the sole owner of the company. The president of the company was for many years Dede Gardner, but she and Pitt named Jeremy Kleiner co-president with Gardner in 2013. Three of the production company's movies, The Departed, 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight, have won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
John Crowley is an Irish film and theatre director. He is best known for the films Brooklyn (2015) and his debut feature, Intermission (2003), for which he won an Irish Film and Television Award for Best Director. He is a brother of the designer Bob Crowley.
Alloy Entertainment, LLC is a book packaging and television production unit of Warner Bros. Television Studios. It produces books, television series, and feature films.
The Goldfinch is a novel by the American author Donna Tartt. It won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among other honors. Published in 2013, it was Tartt's first novel since The Little Friend in 2002.
Ansel Elgort is an American actor and singer. He began his acting career with a supporting role in the horror film Carrie (2013). He gained wider recognition for starring as a teenage cancer patient in the romantic drama film The Fault in Our Stars (2014) and for his supporting role in The Divergent Series (2014–2016).
The Goldfinch is a painting by the Dutch Golden Age artist Carel Fabritius of a life-sized chained goldfinch. Signed and dated 1654, it is now in the collection of the Mauritshuis in The Hague, Netherlands. The work is a trompe-l'œil oil on panel measuring 33.5 by 22.8 centimetres that was once part of a larger structure, perhaps a window jamb or a protective cover. It is possible that the painting was in its creator's workshop in Delft at the time of the gunpowder explosion that killed him and destroyed much of the city.
November Criminals is a 2017 American crime drama film, directed by Sacha Gervasi and written by Gervasi and Steven Knight, and based on Sam Munson's 2010 novel The November Criminals. The film stars Ansel Elgort, Chloë Grace Moretz, Catherine Keener, and David Strathairn.
Willa Fitzgerald is an American actress. She is known for her starring role as Emma Duval in MTV's Scream. She has played cheer coach Colette French in the USA Network's television drama series Dare Me and officer Roscoe Conklin in the Amazon Prime Video television series Reacher. Her other notable roles include Amazon Studios' television series Alpha House, the USA Network's drama series Royal Pains, and Netflix's horror miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher.
Rampage is a 2018 American science fiction monster film directed by Brad Peyton and loosely based on the video game series of the same name by Midway Games, from a screenplay by Ryan Engle, Carlton Cuse, Ryan J. Condal and Adam Sztykiel. The film stars Dwayne Johnson in the lead role, Naomie Harris, Malin Åkerman, Jake Lacy, Joe Manganiello and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. It follows a primatologist who must team up with George, an albino western lowland gorilla who turns into a raging creature of enormous size and growing into bigger and larger sizes as a result of a rogue experiment, to stop two other mutated animals from destroying Chicago.
Andrés Walter Muschietti is an Argentine film director and screenwriter who achieved wide recognition with the 2013 film Mama. He gained further recognition for directing both films in the It film series, the 2017 film adaptation of the Stephen King novel and its sequel, It Chapter Two. In 2023, he directed the DC Extended Universe film The Flash.
Billionaire Boys Club is a 2018 American biographical crime drama film directed by James Cox and co-written by Cox and Captain Mauzner. The film is about the social club and Ponzi scheme of the same name. The film stars Ansel Elgort, Taron Egerton, Emma Roberts, Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irvine, Thomas Cocquerel, Rosanna Arquette, Cary Elwes, and Judd Nelson. The film is based on the real life Billionaire Boys Club from Southern California during the 1980s, a group of rich teenagers who get involved in a Ponzi scheme and eventual murder. The story was previously made into a television film in 1987, which starred Judd Nelson as Joe Hunt, while he plays that character's father in the 2018 version.
Finn Wolfhard is a Canadian actor and musician. He is known for playing Mike Wheeler on the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–present). He also played the roles of Richie Tozier in the horror film It (2017) and its sequel It Chapter Two (2019), and has starred in the supernatural film Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021). Wolfhard has since made his directorial debut with the comedy short film Night Shifts (2020).
Bill Dubuque is an American screenwriter known for such films as The Accountant, A Family Man, The Judge, and the television series Ozark. In 2017 he scripted an upcoming DC Extended Universe Nightwing film and has been connected to an Accountant sequel.
Shaft is a 2019 American action comedy film directed by Tim Story and written by Kenya Barris and Alex Barnow. The film stars Samuel L. Jackson, Jessie T. Usher, Regina Hall, and Richard Roundtree. It is the fifth film in the Shaft series, a sequel to the 2000 film with the same title and was also Roundtree's final portrayal of the original eponymous character John Shaft Sr. before his death in 2023.
The Witches, is a 2020 dark fantasy comedy horror film co-produced and directed by Robert Zemeckis, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kenya Barris and Guillermo del Toro, based on the 1983 novel The Witches by Roald Dahl. It is the second film adaptation of the novel, following The Witches (1990). The film stars Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Stanley Tucci, and Kristin Chenoweth.
Bradford Simpson is an American film and television producer and partner at Los Angeles-based film studio Color Force.
Studio 8 is an American entertainment company founded in 2014, by Jeff Robinov, John Graham, Mark Miner and based in Culver City. It specializes in film and television production.
Sunday Night Productions is an American film and television production company founded by John Krasinski and Allyson Seeger in 2013. It has produced the television series Lip Sync Battle, Dream Corp LLC, and Jack Ryan, the YouTube streaming news show Some Good News (2020), and the films Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009), Promised Land (2012), The Hollars (2016), and A Quiet Place Part II (2020).
Berlanti Productions is an American film and television production company founded by screenwriter, producer and filmmaker Greg Berlanti and producer Mickey Liddell.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
