After breaking out with Beasts of the Southern Wild, Benh Zeitlin has stumbled with his misjudged take on Peter Pan
It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as Hollywood: a hotshot young director scores on their first outing and, awash with accolades and flattering box-office receipts, goes out to make their big follow-up. Then … nothing. The curse of the sophomore slump strikes, leaving a once-promising talent on the skids, their initial flickers of greatness now called into question. The latest retelling of this narrative also happens to be one of the most stark, in terms of the distance between a hit’s point A and a bellyflop’s point B. This week, the new film Wendy becomes the latest spurned by that fickle mistress show business.
Related: Wendy review – Peter Pan fantasy that never grows up into an interesting film