Luc Besson is betting heavily on Valerian
With its $180 million budget, two relatively new stars and obscure source material, Luc Besson is betting the house on the success of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
The most expensive independent film ever made, the space fantasy has been a passion project for the French director ever since he was a young boy.
Besson’s studio Europa Corp posted record losses of $135 million during the last financial year, after a string of US-distributed box office flops including 9 Lives, Shut In, Miss Sloane
and The Circle.
The company is looking to establish Valerian as a blockbuster franchise and desperately needs it to be an undisputed hit to justify a sequel. Variety magazine estimates that when marketing and other costs are figured in, Valerian will have to recoup some $400 million worldwide to make it into the black.
Mixed early reviews do not augur particularly well for the numerous investors in the project, financed entirely outside the “Big Six” Hollywood studio system. It has an average score of 46 out of 100 with online reviews collator Metacritic, and has been dismissed by Entertainment
Weekly as an “epic mess.” The most excoriating criticism came from influential trade paper The
Hollywood Reporter, which described it as “unclear, unfun, indecipherable, indigestible and, before long, an excellent sedative.”
Smitten with Laureline
Besson, now 58, has dreamed of making the picture since happening upon the comic strip Valerian and Laureline, the adventures of two intergalactic “special ops” agents, when he was living in the countryside outside Paris at the age of 10.
“That was probably my only escape door to be free, to imagine, to dream. I remember that clearly,” Besson told AFP, describing how he was immediately smitten with Laureline.
“She was free, she was kicking a**, killing aliens. The first image of this woman was very strong and I was in love right away with her. She was so sexy,” he said.
The young Besson devoured all 21 volumes of the serial written by French author Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mezieres.
Besson went on to make a string of classics including Subway (1985), The Big Blue (1988), Nikita (1990), Leon:
The Professional (1994) and The Fifth Element (1997). All the while Valerian and Laureline were at the back of his mind but Besson knew that special effects were not up to reproducing his vision of their cinematic universe, so he bided his time.
Avatar moment
It wasn’t until James Cameron invited Besson to the set of his 2009 space epic Avatar that the director decided the technology was at last up to scratch.
“I saw Avatar and I came back home and I put my script in the garbage and started again. Because Avatar just pushes all the limits and it was just amazing, and I was not at that level,” Besson said.