“Adam Driver fights dinosaurs in a sci-fi blockbuster” is one hell of a marketing hook, especially when it’s written and directed by the masterminds behind A Quiet Place and produced by Sam Raimi, which left many wondering how 65 turned out to be so egregiously awful as a movie.
The premise was rock solid, the leading man is one of his generation’s finest talents, and the key creatives carved out a reputation for painting familiar strokes in fresh colors. And yet, it ranks as the worst-reviewed entry in Driver’s entire filmography, flopped at the box office, and was forgotten in an instant.
A seemingly innocuous and entirely self-explanatory Reddit thread titled “65, just bad” may have offered up some insight, though, after a user purporting to have worked on the production shared just how things managed to go so horrendously awry.
“I worked on it. It was a complete f*cking disaster on set. The two directors couldn’t make a decision to save their lives, they were totally f*cking clueless and I have no idea why anyone thought they should have access to the kind of money they had. Driver knew it too and he let them know it. He was also kind of a d*ck. The production was cheap as f*ck and there were a bunch of assholes on it that screamed at you all the *cking time.
The story changed too, they def reshot sh*t after filming wrapped and the crew knew they didn’t have a movie. He was supposed to crash cause space was lonely and he did drugs on the ship to cope with it but they cut that part out. It had so much potential to be a great origin of man story and they just f*cked it up at every turn.”
While the story hasn’t been confirmed or corroborated, it’s not hard to imagine that an unruly set and an out of their depth filmmaking team would be responsible for such a dire slice of cinematic garbage, regardless of whether you take the inside source’s words as gospel or not.