Trivia / Marooned

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $8–10 million. Box office, $4.1 million.
• Life Imitates Art: And art comes out second best: Marooned hit theaters less than a year before the Apollo 13 mission, which conclusively demonstrated the many orders of magnitude by which the real American manned space program was more awesome than films like this one make it out to be. The truth is actually even more surprising, according to this article.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Frank Capra began work on the film. Inspired by his work on the Martin-Marietta Corp.-commissioned faux documentary, Rendezvous in Space for the 1964 World's Fair in New York, Capra (a chemical engineer by education) worked to make the picture for Columbia, but finally abandoned the project in preproduction in May 1966 when he couldn't bring the budget down to the $3-million required by Columbia worldwide production chief M.J. Frankovich. The eventual budget for the finished film was $8 million. Capra never made another film.
  • Steve McQueen (actor) was originally considered for Buzz Lloyd.

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