’Tis the season of the turkey, so let’s celebrate sci-fi biggest flops of the past 12 months
Ready for some turkey? Well, you don’t have to wait until Christmas Day. Here we look back at some of the sci-fi flops of 2011. And by that we don’t just mean things that SFX loathed (like Immortals, with its Olympic table football table and Jean Paul Gaultier-dressed gods, or No Ordinary Family which took blandness to new levels, or even “The Curse Of The Black Spot” for making pirates dull) but the films, episodes and comics that either tanked or got a universal thumbs down on the internet. Be warned – you may feel overstuffed by the end of this article.
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Not just a flop of 2011, but of one of the biggest cinematic losers of all time, Robert Zemeckis’s Mars Needs Moms cost about $175m (£110m) to make and market yet grossed less than $40 million worldwide. It also – for the moment – seems to have forced the end of Zemeckis’s love affair with motion capture CG movies and seeming inability to see any problem with the uncanny valley. Having directed The Polar Express and Beowulf using the process, Zemeckis set up the company ImageMovers Digital with Disney in a deal to create more motion capture films. First up was A Christmas Carol, with a CG Jim Carrey, then Mars Needs Moms. A new version of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine was in development, but after the gargantuan failure of Mars Needs Moms, Disney and ImageMovers parted company and Zemeckis is now back in the world of live action films with the Denzel Washington thriller Flight. Somehow, though, ImageMovers has survived, having entered a new two-year deal with Universal. Well, the company presumably came at a knock-down price by that point.
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Tags: DC, Featured, Green Lantern, Mars Needs Moms, Outcasts, Sanctuary, Smallville, Starfire, Superheroes, Superman, Supernatural, Torchwood, Wonder Woman
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