Why Val Kilmer's Red Planet Failed At The Box Office

This post contains spoilers for "Red Planet."

With the exception of "Total Recall" and "The Martian," films centered around our dusty neighboring planet have often fallen flat. Even among the duds, few have flopped as spectacularly as 2000's "Red Planet" starring Val Kilmer. With a production budget of $80 million, the unrealized blockbuster, co-produced by the Australian studio Village Roadshow Pictures and distributed by Warner Bros., brought in no more than $33 million from the worldwide box office, resulting in a significant loss.

A common theory behind the underperformance of "Red Planet" is that it lost out to its twin film "Mission to Mars" from director Brian De Palma that premiered eight months prior in March 2000. Neither film, however, was a financial success, and "Mission to Mars," with $106 million worldwide, barely made a profit on its own high $90 million budget. Audiences of "Mission to Mars" must have felt they'd seen enough of the planet because they did not show up again in November.

It's not fair, though, to put all the blame on De Palma's film. Both were poorly received by critics, indicating their quality had as much to do with their individual failures as the fact that the public wasn't hungry for a story about Mars. Here, it might be easy to point fingers at rookie director Antony Hoffman, who never made another film after "Red Planet," but his craftsmanship cannot be fully to blame. The screenplay and cast hold just as much responsibility.

Proof that Antony Hoffman had the right intentions with "Red Planet" comes through in his commitment to scientific accuracy. Hoffman spent months working with NASA engineers to maximize the film's verisimilitude. They must have provided him with some pessimistic predictions because the movie sets the first crewed mission to Mars in the 2050s rather than the ambitiously timed 2020 Mars expedition in "Mission to Mars."

Hoffman's attention to detail is most apparent in the visual effects, which may have aged in appearance but fully hold up in concept. Hoffman went as far as to use real images from missions to Mars in his film. His rendering of technology is also authentic. The airbags used to land on Mars in the film are based on the same mechanism that NASA's Mars Pathfinder mission demonstrated in 1996 and again on the Spirit and Opportunity rover landings. "Red Planet" also depicts a robotic helicopter on Mars over 20 years before Ingenuity became the first aircraft to fly on another planet in April 2021. And as far-fetched as a robotic killer canine might have seemed in 2000, they actually exist today thanks to Boston Dynamics and other robot companies, which — though it brings limited comfort — have pledged not to weaponize them.

By the end, "Red Planet" suffers from the same syndrome as "Jurassic World: Dominion" and instead of being a movie about Mars or dinosaurs, it's about bugs. It's an intriguing idea that in an attempt to terraform Mars, humanity has accidentally revived a Martian insect species that feeds on algae to produce oxygen. But any commitment to realism is pretty much abandoned when they start glowing and eating humans from the inside out. Clearly, the finale did not resonate with audiences, but I'd argue "Red Planet" had a bigger problem in its cast.

The screenwriters of "Red Planet," Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin, largely fail their core characters with absent backstories, homogenous personalities, and generic voiceover captain logs that we've seen in every space movie. But the cast, which would normally bring plenty of talent to the table, does nothing to elevate the script either. Val Kilmer, who has delivered strong performances in some of the most beloved films of all time with 1986's "Top Gunn" and 1995's "Heat," mostly phones in his role as Mechanical Engineer, Robby Gallagher, after it's loosely established that he's rebellious and flirty. He shares some amount of chemistry with Carrie Ann Moss as Lieutenant Commander Kate Bowman, but any romantic development is severed when Moss is stranded on their orbiting spacecraft while the rest of the crew lands on Mars.

From there, "Red Planet" depends on Kilmer to co-lead the film with Tom Sizemore as the geneticist, Dr. Burchenal. To the detriment of the film, Kilmer and Sizemore were feuding with one another on set to the point of a physical conflict, and it shows in their wooden interactions on screen. Simon Baker and Benjamin Bratt's thinly written roles certainly do nothing to make up for this lack of momentum, and Terrence Stamp's always elegant presence is still too short-lived to make any difference.

Despite its faithful and often visually impressive portrayal of a human mission to Mars, the sum of its parts does not add up to very much, and regretfully, it can be a bit boring at times. While it was a disaster for the careers of Kilmer and Hoffman, it says nothing about space movies as vehicles for actors or directors. "Interstellar" and "Dune" would remind us of that.