This looks like the start of a familiar story for screenwriter Diablo Cody. Her last horror-comedy had a similarly poor start at the box office, failing to break even by the end of its run, and to this day holds a score of just 46% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, “Jennifer’s Body” has since undergone a fierce reappraisal as memories of the terrible, misleading marketing campaign directed at horny teenage boys faded, and people got to grips with the movie that Cody actually made.
“Seeing ‘Jennifer’s Body,’ used as a marketing tool is the funniest thing the world to me,” Cody told Empire magazine in a recent interview, referencing the “Lisa Frankenstein” trailer’s name-dropping of the 2009 film. “It was such a spectacular failure at the time. If you had told me then that it would be used to market something I wrote in the future, I would have said, ‘Why? Why wouldn’t you bury that information?'”
But many movies for teenage weirdos that are now considered classics were once big box office losers, from “Heathers” (which grossed just $1.1 million) to “Donnie Darko” (which made only $517,375 in its initial run). It’s practically a rite of passage. Perhaps “Lisa Frankenstein” will find new life, and a new audience, when it eventually makes its way to streaming.
