The director behind the blockbuster flop Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), Kerry Conran, has addressed the perceived failure of the 2004 sci-fi adventure movie, declaring that the reports surrounding its lack of success at the box office have been greatly exaggerated. In a new interview with Variety to commemorate the movie’s 20th anniversary, Conran says that “As much as this film was a great thing for me, it was also a painful thing for me,” calling the finished film “far from perfect” and revealing why he thinks Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow performed so poorly.
“At the time I thought it certainly was far from perfect, and that fell entirely on my shoulders. And I’m accepting of that. I don’t think I failed as much as I wish the film had done better in the box office, but there are reasons for that. It was never engineered to be what it was later presented as.”
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was met with largely positive reviews from critics and has since garnered a cult following thanks to its, at the time, revolutionary style of filming which blends live-action actors with CGI backgrounds. Unfortunately, it faltered at the box office, earning just 58 million against its reported $70 million budget. However, according to Conran, Paramount turned the movie into “something different” than the “independent film” he had envisioned.
“But in retrospect, because a film’s success these days is whether it makes money or not, it didn’t do the ultimate thing it was supposed to. As it was, there’s a lot of misconceptions about what the film cost. Like I said, when we first started making it, our budget went from $3 million to $10 million, in that range. The film ultimately cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $12 million or something like that. That additional money wasn’t from me, it was making it color.”
Kerry Conran Disputes Reports About the Huge Sky Captain Budget
While the figure of a $70 million budget has been widely reported, Kerry Conran disputes this, theorizing how he thinks such a figure was found.
“Also, Paramount had a “Mission: Impossible” film that wasn’t going to be ready, so they needed something for their winter release. I didn’t promise it because at the time it was simple math to tell you how long it was going to take us, because our little meager render farm could generate only so many frames per hour. So that’s when additional money came online to kind of buy more computers. There was also a lot of money at stake for [financier Aurelio de Laurentiis], who sold it. And that’s where the budget discrepancy, I think, comes from: he made a lot of money off the sale of the film, and we didn’t apply that to the film itself.”
The influence that Sky Captain has had on the use of digital effects, backgrounds in particular, is undeniable. Sadly, the movie’s financial failure greatly affected Conran’s career, with the filmmaker losing the chance to bring a John Carter movie to life similarly to how Sky Captain was realized.
Written and directed by Kerry Conran and starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow combines science fiction, action, adventure, and “dieselpunk” to transport audiences to a New York City under siege by giant robots. So, was the sci-fi adventure movie simply ahead of its time and treated unfairly at the box office? Or was Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow simply lacking where it counts?
