Trivia / Red Planet

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $80 million. Gross, $33 million.
• Creator Killer: Antony Hoffman has never directed another film - and this was his debut.
• Defictionalization: Two decades after this film's release, NASA sent Ingenuity, a helicopter drone, to Mars as part of the Perseverance mission. This drone operates in a similar fashion to AMEE's flying drone, using twin rotors spinning in opposite directions to achieve lift.
• Dueling Movies: A three-way duel with the same year's Mission to Mars, and the following year's Ghosts of Mars. This film took the wooden spoon in that duel, coming far behind Mission to Mars in terms of box-office and critical performance (and that film was already considered somewhat disappointing in those regards), and even being worse-reviewed and less profitable than Ghosts of Mars (which did take somewhat less at the box-office, but also had a budget less than a third of this film and did better on DVD).
• Hostility on the Set: Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore began feuding during production. According to reports, it all began when Kilmer got annoyed about a fancy exercise machine that Sizemore wanted shipped from England to the set in Australia. Eventually the two hated each other so much, Kilmer would not come out of his trailer if Sizemore was on the set. Many of their scenes together were filmed over the shoulders of photo doubles. Kilmer reportedly refused to say Sizemore's character's name, saying instead "Hey, you!" At one point, they got into a confrontation that escalated into them throwing weights at each other until Sizemore knocked out Kilmer with a punch to the chest. (At a crewmember's request, he avoided Kilmer's face). The two have never worked together again.
• Star-Derailing Role: Val Kilmer's behavior on the set, combined with film's poor reception and bombing in the box-office, was the final nail to his career as an A-lister, never to recover.
• Vindicated by Cable: Oh hell yes. Since the movie was a massive flop (making it cheap to license), but in the same time came with an All-Star Cast and was still a competently made sci-fi movie, it very easily found its second life and dedicated fanbase via TV reruns.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Joseph Fiennes was initially in talks to play Robby Gallagher.
  • Meg Ryan was offered the role of Kate Bowman.
• Working Title: The original title of this film was, simply, Mars. But the release of Mission to Mars in the same year required a name change.

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