Teen romance ‘Beautiful Creatures’ could fill ‘Twilight’ void

Looking to fill the void left by the end of the Twilight Saga, supernatural love story Beautiful Creatures opened on Thursday.

Based on the first novel in the best-selling series by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl, Oscar-nominated Richard LaGravenese directs from his adapted screenplay the tale of two star-crossed teenage lovers.

Alden Ehrenreich plays Tetro, while newcomer Alice Englert plays Lena and both uncover dark secrets about their families, their history and their town.

Trying to sum up the movie’s plot in one sentence, Englert said: “Witch girl learns humanity through mortal and is redeemed.”

Adapted from a best-selling teen supernatural book, Ehrenreich felt that LaGravenese had been respectful of the source material and, although it had to be cut down, nothing major had been omitted.

“It’s a 600 and something page book, so it had to be consolidated. But to me, because I read the book while we were making the movie, there was nothing that felt like ‘oh, we’ve missed that’. Hopefully fans will feel the same way,” he said.

Englert was unsure whether fans of the book would be able to forgive any deviations from the original text.

“I’m sorry but as someone who is an avid reader I completely understand and apologize in advance, but we did our best,” she said.

The movie draws obvious comparisons with Twilight and its sequels, though Ehrenreich claimed he hadn’t seen that vampire romance.

Beautiful Creatures would naturally hope to take a bite out of the lucrative teen market for supernatural romance, but Englert said that didn’t concern the team while making the film.

“I think the media is probably looking for a Twilight replacement because it did take up such a big space in the media during its time. But I don’t think us and the team that made it really had much of a relation to that or an attachment to that,” she said.

Beautiful Creatures also stars Academy Award winners Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson.