BOOM! That's the sound of Luc Besson's "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets." US Weekend total is $17 million, not even a multiple of Friday's $6 million. Costing at least $225 million, "Valerian" is a domestic dud.
The only hope for STX Films on the most expensive indie film ever made is people in non English speaking countries not caring about the story or dialogue. This often the case, and dud films– see "The Mummy" — can find audiences who just want the visual flash.
"Valerian" will have to count on China, Russia, South Korea, and other out of the way locales to bail them out.
The previews looked visually amazing. Was the movie really that bad?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @05:45PM (2 children)
No mention that Valérian is originally a fairly popular French comic series? Even if it sucks I'll see it because that was my childhood.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 24 2017, @07:48PM (1 child)
Yes its an old French comic, per wikipedia. When I read it, the plot sounded very ringworld-ish but google implies neither copied from each other. Initially I thought maybe the new movie copied the old ringworld, but it turns out the comic is half a century old so maybe ringworld copied aspects of the comic...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @03:29PM
Valerian is a spacetime operative . He's basically a 007 timecop and the source material is very different from Ringworld. The only parallel is that, for the time, they both had very alien aliens.