YMMV / The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Unless you were already a fan of the books, the film looked like a formulaic copy-and-paste of other YA Urban Fantasy works like The Twilight Saga and Harry Potter (its derivative story and characters were one of the main criticisms in reviews). The movie cut out a lot of exposition and character-building moments to fit the story into a two-hour film, which annoyed book fans and led to confusion among non-book readers. The infamous Surprise Incest subplot was also a turn-off for viewers who just wanted to watch a straight-forward paranormal romance and is arguably an inappropriate subject for younger audiences who might otherwise be interested in the film.^note the books do reveal that the characters aren't actually siblings, which slightly offsets the situation, but this isn't mentioned in the film All this culminated in City of Bones being a box office disappointment and the cancellation of the sequels, with the franchise later getting a more successful TV adaptation, Shadowhunters.
• Cliché Storm: Let's see...the seemingly ordinary protagonist discovers she has a Secret Legacy involving a hidden world of magical beings and is whisked off to a magic school, is torn romantically between a bad boy and her childhood friend, finds out she has powers that are super rare even amongst her own kind, and discovers that her long-lost dad is the Big Bad whom her mother was trying to hide her from. The only part that was less predictable was the revelation that the protagonist's main love interest is actually her brother, although this didn't exactly work in the film's favor given the ick factor.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the Simon's complaints about Jace is that he's dyed blonde, despite Jace arguing he is not. Jamie Campbell Bower is a natural blonde, but the next person to play Jace, Dominic Sherwood, did dye his hair blonde for the role.
• Opinion Myopia: Many either think the film failed because it was a half-assed Twilight ripoff or think it failed because Twilight was so bad that it poisoned the well for other, better supernatural young-adult novels being adapted to film.
• Squick: The incest subplot. Namely, the movie spends a big chunk of time establishing Clary and Jace as the Official Couple, including a passionate Big Damn Kiss. Then the Big Bad reveals they're actually long-lost half-siblings. Admittedly, if you've read the books you know it turns out they're not siblings after all...but the movie doesn't mention this due it being Saved for the Sequel.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: It's nearly impossible to find a review of the film that doesn't point out how similar it is to earlier properties, especially franchises that were popular at the time of its release. Most commonly cited were Harry Potter (magic world hidden from 'muggles' which the main character is secretly part of and a magic school of sorts), The Twilight Saga (vampires, werewolves and love triangles), and Star Wars (the Big Bad betrayed the other magic people and is revealed to be the protagonist's dad...oh and Surprise Incest, of all things). The biggest issue most audiences and critics had with this is that the movie comes across less as being merely inspired by these other franchises and more like it just mashed elements of them together, resulting in a rather bland end product with little identity of its own.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Executive producer Martin Moszkowicz stated that he felt one of the reasons the movie failed to take off was because it was heavily marketed towards a younger demographic than the majority of the books' readers; due to the more mature content (in particular the Brother–Sister Incest plotline) and the age of the main characters (late teens), The Mortal Instruments books tended to attract readers in their late teens and twenties. As such, the books' core demographic may have felt alienated that the film seemed to be geared towards tweens, while simultaneously being inappropriate or unappealing to kids. Notably, the Continuity Reboot, Shadowhunters, avoided this by being squarely aimed at an older audience, including aging up the main cast and ramping up the violence and sexual content.
  Moszkowicz: The readers of Mortal Instruments are older than you might think. That may have been one issue in our marketing, that we focused too much on a very young audience segment.

---