How Disney's Mars Needs Moms Became 2011's Biggest Box Office Flop
It's hard to say what could have made Simon Wells' 2011 animated film "Mars Needs Moms" more successful. Per Box Office Mojo, the sci-fi film made just $40 million worldwide on a $150 million budget, making it one of the most expensive sci-fi flops of all time. Some called it the year's biggest flop, and its failure sent shockwaves through Disney to the degree that IndieWire theorized it's why the studio nixed "of Mars" from the title of its 2012 film "John Carter," which effectively doomed that movie as well. Hollywood executive logic says girls wouldn't see a movie about Mars and boys wouldn't see a movie with "moms" in the title.
For all of the movie's innovative effects and its strong narrative hook of a child trying to find his mother while lost on an alien world, "Mars Needs Moms" failed to land with the public. The movie is starkly realistic, animated with clarity and high-contrast lighting, and its characters were created through performance capture technology. Maybe that was the first problem. The movie crossed a line that other performance capture-based films from Robert Zemeckis' ImageMovers Digital studio hadn't and found itself in the uncanny valley. For one of the first times, an animated feature looked close enough to real life that you wish it could have been live-action.
Beyond that, the movie's dingy industrial production design means it often looks more like Ridley Scott's "Alien" than a movie for children. It has a dark and tonally awkward story, bouncing from interminable comic relief to horrific suggestions of brainwashing and lobotomies. The dystopian Martian society is hardly the ideal setting for a family adventure movie, especially one made on a blockbuster budget.
From book to screen
When "Mars Needs Moms" came out in 2011, it had plenty of competition. Pixar was coming off of a historic run of films like "Wall-E," "Up," and "Toy Story 3" while Dreamworks' "How to Train Your Dragon" and "Kung Fu Panda" saw that studio hit a new peak in artistic ambition. The off-beat, uncanny sci-fi of "Mars Needs Mom" might have seen some of the success of "Wall-E," but that movie, one of Pixar's biggest gambles, triumphed on the silent film-style charm of its titular character and cartoonish design that still reflected timely anxieties. "Mars Needs Moms" can't compare.
What could have been a fun family adventure with a lot of heart became a largely unappealing mess. As adapted from the Berkeley Breathed picture book of the same name, it keeps the broad strokes (as well as the idea of the touching, sacrificial climax) and adds many complications. Where the Martians of the book are largely simple and well-meaning, director Simon Wells and his co-writer wife Wendy Wells turn them into a hardcore dystopian matriarchal society that abducts mothers to ultimately kill them and download their consciousness onto so-called "nannybots," who raise female Martians to adulthood.
Milo (Seth Dusky, but his performance capture came from Seth Green) is a kid who loses his mom to the Martians one night, just after a bitter argument about eating vegetables. It's a reversal of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," with its iconic image of a mom seeing her child get abducted. Only in this movie, he comes aboard too.
It feels a bit like 2001's "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius," but with blockbuster seriousness.
Character design
The female Martians of "Mars Needs Moms" are slender and angular, while the male Martians, left to rot on the planet's surface, are fuzzy neanderthals. Neither have especially appealing designs. The only really unique Martian looks belong to the sympathetic, Earth-loving Ki (Elisabeth Harnois) and the villainous Supervisor (Mindy Sterling), who keeps the society in check with a constant surplus of new Earth moms. In the book, the Martians were uniformly gloopy and round, and fairly colorful, fitting with their more innocent roles, but the movie makes them intimidating and scary. At least too scary for the younger kids who might have been interested in the feature.
Still, they're not as scary as the humans. With his ImageMovers Digital studio, Robert Zemeckis spent much of the 2000s pioneering a method of performance capture and utilizing it in films. The characters often teetered on the edge of the uncanny valley — the range in which human characteristics on inhuman things become unsettling.
Brad Bird used stylized designs in crafting the characters of Pixar's first all-human cast in 2004's "The Incredibles." Zemeckis released "The Polar Express" the same year, a movie in which every adult character looks a bit too much like Tom Hanks. That it managed to become a Christmas classic speaks to the strength of every aspect besides its character designs.
Other movies from ImageMovers Digital, such as 2006's "Monster House," could charm audiences and even use the performance capture to great effect. But across the board, the look gives the movies' human characters an off-base quality, something never more apparent than in "Mars Needs Moms." In particular, preteen Milo's resemblance to his performance capture actor Seth Green, who would have been in his late 30s at the time of filming, never quite works.
Comic relief (or lack thereof)
It's possible that "Mars Needs Moms" could have found some redemption in being funny, but so much of the comic relief in the movie is loud and desperate. A lot of it comes from Gribble (Dan Fogler), another human on the Martian vessel on which Milo has stowed away.
Gribble is slovenly and a little pathetic — he almost always acts childishly despite clearly being an adult male. When he meets Milo, he sees a potential new friend, for the first time in the decades since he came on the ship. All he can reference is "Top Gun" and moonwalking, and he's largely ineffectual until the movie's climax. Until then, he's a bit of a gag machine, stopping only to discuss his tragic backstory in specific detail. As a child, he suffered what Milo is currently going through — his mother's abduction by the Martians, and he has made a conscious choice to never grow up. The scene plays out surprisingly tastefully given the otherwise constant jokes about Gribble's weight and demeanor.
Meanwhile, Gribble's eventual Martian love interest Ki fixates on a different era of American culture. Where he only knows the '80s, she has become obsessed with a sitcom vision of 1960s counterculture, the moment where she learned about color. That's a novelty to the cool-toned environments of the Martians, and it comprises most of her character. That obsession isn't a joke that plays for children in the audience, and it probably didn't play for their parents either — it feels like the most Robert Zemeckis-y gag in the movie, a full embrace of the "Forrest Gump" school of humor.
The Zemeckis touch
Still, "Mars Needs Moms" isn't without merit. It moves quickly, and in more skillful hands it could have been a classic "young boy on a mission" movie. But the material added to develop the original picture book into a feature film detracts from the original's charm, and the movie's bizarre self-seriousness would have turned away a lot of the preschoolers who might have had affection for the story.
As director Simon Wells told Screen Anarchy in 2011, much of the narrative design of the screenplay's final draft came from the heavily involved producer Robert Zemeckis. Zemeckis, a legendary screenwriter in his own right, tore the original script's third act "to pieces," Wells claimed, and for good reason. Presumably, by that point, the production's momentum was unstoppable, or else somebody might have stopped and asked themselves why things had gotten as dark as they were.
Zemeckis's fame (or infamy) around the time of the release of "Mars Needs Moms" largely revolved around his getting hung up on the performance capture technology at the expense of story. For as much as he revolutionized visual effects, he has suffered diminishing returns as a filmmaker, and his control over the movie meant it suffered a bit too.
The visual design of "Mars Needs Moms" may be a little unappealing, but there are plenty of beautiful sights. The environments are incredible and detailed, whether you're seeing the harsh surface of Mars or the sterile Martian ships, and the lighting and cinematography of Robert Presley occasionally turn the movie into a remarkably beautiful science fiction movie. If only it happened more often.