French rival to Star Wars suffers a fate worse than Death Star
FRENCH dreams of creating a Gallic blockbuster to rival Star Wars have gone up in smoke after the most expensive film in European cinema history flopped at the domestic box office.
It was hoped that Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, a science fiction film starring the pop star Rihanna as an alien stripper, Dane Dehaan, the American actor, and Cara Delevingne, the British supermodel, would take the country’s cinema production to a new level, allowing it to vie with Hollywood.
With a budget of £136 million, the film by French director-producer Luc Besson was the latest to be shot in the Cité du Cinéma, a studio complex dubbed Hollywood-sur-seine, which opened in 2012 with the stated aim of competing with Cinecittà in Rome, Pinewood Studios in London and Babelsberg in Berlin. However, it made just £35million in France and was rescued only by a modest profit worldwide.
Besson had film success with Lucy starring Scarlett Johansson, The Fifth Element with Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich, and the Taken and Transporter franchises. However, after a string of flops and financial losses, Valerian was seen as his make or break moment.
Despite the star line-up, the glitzy space romp failed to take off, making under £200million worldwide, faring poorly in the US, where the Hollywood Reporter wrote: “Rihanna should pretend this never happened.”
Besson’s film company, Europacorp, last week announced record losses of $135million in 2016, forcing it to cut its staff to just 10 per cent of its original workforce of 60, reducing budgets to a maximum of £27million per film and cutting its film output by half.
Besson’s next film is set to be an English-language thriller with a female lead, budgeted in the £27 million range.
The failure of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets will have left faces red in the French government, which changed the law specifically for Besson after he threatened to make the film in Hungary because generous tax breaks in France only applied to productions shot in the French language.