When you think of independent cinema, arthouse dramas and experimental oddities are typically what comes to mind, not $200 million sci-fi blockbusters. And yet, Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is an indie film.
Not just any old kind, though, but the single most expensive of all-time, as well as the costliest European movie ever made. That immediately put an albatross around the comic book adaptation’s neck, one that it was never going to shake off given that almost everyone was predicting box office disaster from a mile away.
Sure enough, a $226 million haul saw the project lose an estimated $82 million once the dust had settled, but Besson was still teasing sequels in the aftermath due to the positive reactions from fans. These days, Valerian is a great deal closer to being forgotten about entirely than it is inching towards cult classic status, unless you happen to be a Netflix subscriber.
Per FlixPatrol, the misadventures of the painfully miscast Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevigne attempting to maintain order among the human territories of deep space has become unexpectedly in-demand on-demand, having been beamed up onto the streaming service’s global most-watched charts.
Splashy effects and sweeping visuals are typically nailed-on when it comes to at-home audiences, because there can’t be many people willing to check out Valerian as anything other than eye candy. It’s got plenty of that, to be fair, but it’s severely lacking in virtually every other department that matters from top to bottom.