Via PZ Meyers, Kyle Smith reports that The Golden Compass was the end of the line, and no more His Dark Materials movies will be made.

According to Wikipedia, the budget for the film was about $180 million, and according to Rotten Tomatoes, the movie grossed about $67.5 million. Apparently the movie did pretty well overseas, but New Line pre-sold the overseas rights, so they didn't get a percentage of that haul. It's an interesting case study in film history and economics. Why did it tank so badly?

I had read the book, and I thought the film was actually pretty good. Maybe that's because I knew the details of the story, so it didn't seem confusing and disjointed as some people thought. The movie has a 41% rating on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing, and though some of the negative reviews point to it being confusing, many just say it seems lifeless and lackluster.

I remarked earlier that I thought they had punted by clipping the ending just a bit short, avoiding some of the nastier and more anti-religious elements of the film. It's true that they watered the film down some, but were the crappy box office results a product of too much watering down, or not enough? Maybe in trying to split the difference, they ended up in no-man's land. I'm generally in favor of trying to stick as closely as possible to the source material, especially if it was very successful, and Pullman's books have been successful.

Ah well...I wanted to see how they handled the outlandish weirdness of the ongoing story, just out of curiosity, but I'm not all that bummed that they won't be made. I didn't happen to think the books, what I read of them, were all that great.