Paramount+ Just Added an Infamous Box Office Bomb That Tried (and Failed) to Be the Next Twilight

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One such movie, Beautiful Creatures, just landed on Paramount+ at the start of October, and it’s honestly one of the better Twilight copycats to arrive in the 2010s. While Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s Beautiful Creatures novel was very successful — along with the series that followed — the 2013 big screen adaptation was anything but.

Arriving five years after the first Twilight, Beautiful Creatures made just over $60 million at the box office, barely enough to even make back its production budget. Needless to say, the entire series from Garcia and Stohl didn’t get the chance to play out in movie theaters.

While the movie definitely feels like a Twilight copycat, Beautiful Creatures does have quite a lot going for it — the parts just happen to be greater than the whole. Now that the film is back streaming on Paramount+, it might be a good time to revisit a franchise that could’ve been, if the studio had been a little less focused on trying to re-create Twilight.

Beautiful Creatures Isn’t Great (But Still Deserved Better)

While Twilight deals with the world of vampires and werewolves, Beautiful Creatures is all about the realm of magic. And instead of a mortal girl getting thrown into an unexpected and dangerous world, it’s a teen boy who is suddenly caught up in a magical adventure. It’s easy to see how Warner Bros. saw Twilight-colored dollar signs when reading Beautiful Creatures, but the characters should have been able to set the film apart, had they only been given the chance to shine.

Beautiful Creatures follows South Carolina teenager Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich in his breakout role) who wonders into the world of magic when he connects with newcomer Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert). Her family is magical and many of the other students shun her because they believe the Duchannes’ are devil-worshippers. There’s honestly a lot of Carrie and “satanic panic” influences to the story, which might have taken the overall tone in a different (and better) direction if they’d been given more time.

I don’t want to dive too much deeper into the plot as to save you from spoilers, but this magical world has roots back in the Civil War, and Lena ends up in something of a war with her own relatives. It’s a great story, especially given the flipping of gender roles and the idea of the power resting with Lena instead of Ethan. And sorry to the Twilight fans out there, but their relationship is so much more compelling than Bella and Edward’s — and a lot easier to root for.

Unfortunately, the film version of Beautiful Creatures didn’t do the novel justice, and a franchise died before it could really begin. But we’ll always have this initial movie to enjoy, and its arrival on Paramount+ makes it much easier to do so.