A film adaptation of author Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl was a great idea back in 2001 when the first book in the series racked up impressive sales. As seven print sequels followed, the movie version languished in development hell until 2016, when Disney began work on it.
After all those years, Artemis Fowl was set to premiere in August 2019, but it got pushed back to May 2020. Now a worldwide pandemic and calculating Disney executives have once again thwarted the titular tween supervillain from his big screen debut. Instead, Artemis Fowl will forgo theaters and video on-demand, heading straight to Disney+, which is both a shrewd business move and a clear indication of the studio's lack of confidence in this tortured project.
It's reasonable that Disney would make space on its summer and fall calendar for more surefire, live action hits like Mulan and Black Widow, so the fact that Artemis Fowl isn't getting a theatrical release at all doesn't necessarily mean the movie is as bad as some fans of the books fear. In the wake of COVID-19, which has shuttered multiplexes all around the globe, every studio has shuffled and condensed their schedules, and some mid-level movies aren't going to make the cut.
Artemis Fowl, being the first in a series and without ties to another intellectual property, was bound to be one of them. However, Disney could have used VOD to try to earn back some of the movie's reported 125 million dollar budget. Disney skipping over every mechanism by which audiences would have to pay directly to see the film is a tell tale sign that it might not be worth paying for.
An Artemis Fowl movie was always going to be riskier than other middle grade and young adult franchises. The series is popular, but it is not nearly as popular as The Hunger Games or Harry Potter. As time passes, and the film was still in pre-production, Artemis's already smaller built-in audience grew up and lost interest.
One of the biggest hurdles the books had to overcome was something Harry Potter was able to avoid. While the characters and content Harry Potter matured with their readers, Artemis Fowl does not. It is a minor distinction, but it explains why there are millions of devoted, adult Potterheads and only casual fans with fond memories of Artemis and his misadventures.
Artemis is also an antihero, the evil genius son of a vanished wealthy crime lord, trying to undermine the fantasy world. Though the books are enjoyable, the tone is playfully dissonant; the writing is youthful and spry, but it is also slick and snarky and the worldbuilding is a little shallow next to comparable series. All of this makes it harder to translate to the screen.
After viewing the trailer, fans took to social media to complain that, instead of a clever cad, Disney had given them a dimwitted generic good guy. The essential elements of several main characters and their relationships seemed to have been Disneyfied, stripped of any acidity, conflict and most likely a mother. Those edits are par for the course when it comes to cartoon mice and princesses, but they've proven to be the kiss of death for subject matter that falls outside of the studio's canon.
In recent years, Disney has underwhelmed, both critically and financially, with what should have been reliable winners like the beloved A Wrinkle in Time and a holiday premiere of The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, but these on screen versions didn't feel as alive as they did on the page or stage. Maybe it's time for Disney to admit that, while they have a particular formula for animated Disney magic, they still haven't cracked the code on live-action or outside literary adaptation.
With Disney losing billions of dollars at the box-office and at its empty theme parks each passing day, they couldn't risk another loss with a film they had no fate in. It's made recent well-liked movies such as Frozen II and Onward available earlier than expected on Disney+, and it's gotten good press and customer appreciation for doing so. By releasing Artemis Fowl on its own streaming service, Disney is not only lowering expectations but raising good will for the movie, which, after almost twenty years of creative turmoil, is probably the best it could do.