Mars Hardball

Booh' Yeah! Some real info about the movies M2M and RED PLANET. Here, M2M's described as "...it feels a bit like Marooned, the 1969 space-rescue thriller with Gregory Peck and David Janssen."

Oddley enough. MAROONED is one of my favorite movies. 10/19/99

Hollywood Confidential
from Reel.Com
by Jeffrey Wells
Mars Hardball

Last April I wrote about the competition between the Mars movies – Warner Bros.' Red Planet (formerly Mars) vs. Disney's Mission to Mars. At the time it was WB's plan to rush Red Planet into production and put it in theatres by April 2000 – roughly three months before Mission's then-expected July 2000 debut. Last August, WB changed Planet's debut to March 31. This followed Disney's decision last July to move Mission's release date to March 10. As it still stands today, there are only three weeks separating the two. If history is any indicator (remember the Dante's Peak vs. Volcano standoff of '97?), one or the other will eventually pull up stakes and open later in the year. But which?

Hollywood has been down this road many times before. Everyone knows that any similar, same-subject film that opens second will probably suffer at the box office. Right now, with Red Planet three weeks behind Mission, it's obvious who has the advantage.

Yes – Armageddon did better than Deep Impact, which it came after. Ditto the superior A Bug's Life after Antz. And Stepmom after One True Thing (both with dying moms). But a three-week gap is too damn short.

Red Planet could always accelerate production and bump its release date up to January or Feburary, but at what cost in terms of overages, not to mention quality? The safest and probably smartest move would be for one of the two to open in the late fall – a good six or seven months after the other Mars flick opens, long enough to dilute at least some of the deja vu that audiences will inevitably be sensing.

At a cost of roughly $120 million, Mission is the bigger-budgeted, more visually splashy of the two. Directed by Brian De Palma, it's about a sudden geological disaster on Mars wiping out all but one of a team of astronauts. A rescue mission is launched back on Earth to save the sole survivor and determine what caused the
disaster. It stars Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, and Don Cheadle.

In my April column I described the Mission script by Ted Tally, Graham Yost, Jim Thomas and John Thomas as not quite the measure of Eugene O'Neill. I also said,

"Truth be told, it feels a bit like Marooned, the 1969 space-rescue thriller with Gregory Peck and David Janssen."

Red Planet, which began life as a script called Alone, stars Val Kilmer, Carrie-Ann Moss, Tom Sizemore, and Terence Stamp. The script is by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathan Lemkin; the director is Anthony Hoffman.

Warner Bros.' decision to green-light it last April was contingent, I'm told, upon plans to get it into theatres before Mission. I wrote last year that it was "smirkingly referred to around the WB lot as 'the dead president's project'" – a reference to the fact that two of its top producers, Village Roadshow chairman Mark Berman and Canton Company's Mark Canton, are ex-Warner Bros. production presidents.

Red Planet is not a straight-ahead rescue movie, I'm told. Except it is, for the most part. I confess to preferring the Pfarrer-Lemkin script over the Tally-Yost-Thomas, etc.

"The first part is about character relations on the ground, almost in a war-movie kind of way," a studio-based producer told me last spring. "Then the stranded astronaut winds up rescuing himself with spirit and ingenuity. This is not Armageddon, it's a smaller idea - but it takes you somewhere you've never been."

20th Century Fox blinked in early '97 when it decided to release Volcano out of close proximity to Dante's Peak, which Universal had slotted for a February release, and opted for an April debut. Any bets out there about which Mars flick will be the first to cave? Any and all views will get a full and fair hearing.

Here's your chance, see the future