Making history for the wrong reasons: How movies about Mars almost always end in unmitigated disaster
Sci-fi has been responsible for some of the greatest movies ever made, from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris to George Lucas’ Star Wars and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, but for whatever reason, the fourth planet from the sun has almost always yielded untold disaster.
Of course, for anybody ready to throw up Ridley Scott’s The Martian in defence, let’s not forget there are always exceptions to prove the rule. The acclaimed intergalactic survival story pulled in over $630 million at the box office, netted seven Academy Award nominations including, ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Actor’, and remains an excellent cosmic story of overcoming adversity. However, the fact remains that it’s an anomaly.
What film reigns supreme as the single biggest money-loser in the history of cinema? It’s John Carter, adapted from Edgar Rice Burrough’s A Princess of Mars. Director Andrew Stanton had two Oscar wins to his name for helming Finding Nemo and Wall-E, but after his first foray into live-action set records for all the wrong reasons, the animated sequel Finding Dory is the sum of his directorial efforts in the last dozen years.
John Carpenter is responsible for several classics and embarked on one of the hottest streaks to ever grace mainstream cinema when he churned out Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, and more in little over a decade, but what’s the worst movie he ever made, signalled a seven-year sabbatical from behind the camera, and served as his penultimate feature ever? Ghosts of Mars.
In the battle of 2000’s blockbuster Martian epics released months apart, who came out as the victor in the war between Mission to Mars and Red Planet? The answer is neither, with both of them being resoundingly panned. The former’s Brian De Palma still hasn’t directed a halfway good movie ever since, while the latter’s first-time helmer Anthony Hoffman completely vanished off the face of the planet.
Turning the focus to animation, Mars Needs Moms hammered the final nail into the coffin for Robert Zemeckis’ ill-fated attempts to turn CGI performance capture into a viable offshoot of cinema, lost over $100million for Disney, and served as the final credit on director Simon Wells’ filmography, to illustrate a concerning pattern of nothing but doom and gloom for the red planet.
Even James Gray’s Ad Astra – a wonderful film that told a family story wrapped in the existential dread of space travel – finds Brad Pitt’s Roy McBride travelling to Mars to see if the crew of an isolated space station are still alive. It lost a fortune at the box office and was effectively disowned by the filmmaker, who called the post-production process “completely screwed up on a corporate level.”
Does anyone remember Liev Schrieber’s The Last Days on Mars? No, then what about Katee Sackhoff’s 2036 Origin Unknown? OK, Mark Strong’s Approaching the Unknown, then? If the answer is yes, then credit is due for persevering with Mars-set cinema, because all three of them are roundly terrible and fell woefully short of turning a profit.
Movies about visitors from outer space have regularly been great, and atmospheric tales of astronauts or spacefaring travellers have proven their greatness several times over, but for whatever reason, the evidence is stacked as high as the Earth’s atmosphere that even contemplating making a film with a heavy reliance on Mars is nigh-on destined to end in dismay.
