By Britta DeVore
| Published
We’re so incredibly used to having every piece of media at our fingertips, with streamers like Netflix offering copious amounts of TV shows and movies for the price of a subscription. Still, some titles haven’t made it to streaming platforms. In an era where fewer than fifty percent of households have access to a DVD or Blu-Ray player, that means they can’t be watched. And if a movie can’t be watched, it will be forgotten.
That’s exactly what’s happening to City of Ember, the 2008 steampunk fantasy movie. Despite a star-studded cast led by Bill Murray, the movie isn’t available to stream anywhere except as an extremely pricey rental on Apple TV. It’s worth paying that price to see.
The film, which is based on Jeanne DuPrau’s 2003 novel, The City of Ember, is a fantasy lover’s dream as it takes audiences underground to the titular city. Running on a generator that has served its purpose for more than a century, time is running out, and with it, the lights within the deep cave start to dim and flicker.
Taking matters into their own hands and seeing themselves as the city’s only hope at restoring light to even its darkest corners, two teenagers, Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan) and Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway) go on a dangerous yet exciting journey to turn the lights back on for good.
After having earned an Oscar nod for her work in Atonement, City of Ember was another pivotal stepping stone in Saoirse Ronan’s career, which would ultimately lead her to earn three more Academy Award nominations and heaps of accolades for her work in such projects as Brooklyn, Lady Bird, and Little Women. The casting team behind the fantastical tale’s on-screen adaptation was on their A-game for this one, as they also nabbed names including Bill Murray (Lost in Translation) and Tim Robbins (The Shawshank Redemption).
Just as it was a pivotal career moment for its star Saoirse Ronan, City of Ember was a similarly huge moment for director Gil Kenan. Two years earlier, Kenan had paired up with Columbia Pictures for the animated horror flick, Monster House, giving him the preparation and connections needed to jump into live-action filmmaking with City of Ember.
From there, Kenan’s hold on Hollywood continued to expand with the helmer attaching himself to the 2015 remake of the horror classic Poltergeist, the holiday fantasy flick, A Boy Called Christmas, and, most recently, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
City Of Ember’s Box Office Disaster
Unfortunately for Kenan’s first live-action film, all the big names around (which included Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman as producers) couldn’t save the production from being a financial disaster. Despite making a concerted effort to time the movie’s release shortly after the final book of DuPrau’s series hit shelves, City of Ember couldn’t keep the lights on at the box office. After spending $55 million on the feature’s production, the movie would only rake in $17.0 million, marking it as a gargantuan box office bust.
City of Ember didn’t bomb because it was terrible; it bombed because no one knew what it was supposed to be. Released in 2008 with a modest budget and almost no marketing push, the film suffered from a complete identity crisis. It looked like a kids’ movie, played like a dystopian thriller, and was based on a book that didn’t have the built-in audience studios were hoping for.
Saoirse Ronan wasn’t a box office draw, and the rest of the cast, while solid, didn’t give audiences a reason to show up opening weekend. Add in a dark, grim visual tone that undercut its family appeal and a release window crowded with bigger, louder competition, and City of Ember simply got buried,one of those cases where a decent movie disappears because the studio never figured out how to sell it.
Why The Critics Got It Wrong
Critically, City of Ember landed in that frustrating middle ground; reviewers generally agreed it was well-made, but not compelling enough to matter. But those critics judged it for what it wasn’t instead of recognizing what it actually was.
Reviews knocked it for being “low-stakes” and too simple, but that restraint is the point; the film isn’t trying to be a bombastic dystopian spectacle, it’s a slow-burn mystery about decay, curiosity, and survival. What critics labeled as thin plotting is really deliberate minimalism, allowing the world itself to carry the tension.
The production design wasn’t just impressive; it was the movie, creating a lived-in, dying civilization that most bigger-budget films fail to achieve. And Saoirse Ronan anchors it with a grounded, human performance that fits the story’s scale perfectly. City of Ember was sincere, patient, and visually rich, qualities critics mistook for weakness when they were actually the film’s biggest strengths.
Why You Can’t Watch City Of Ember
Unfortunately, with weak box office and middling reviews, making City of Ember available on streaming hasn’t been a priority for anyone. It’s not available on any major streaming service.
Currently, the only way to stream City of Ember is via Apple TV, where you have to pay an exorbitant on-demand fee. If you haven’t seen it yet, pay up and watch before it’s gone.
