Movies that were supposed to launch franchises (but didn’t): Lost in Space

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https://lebeauleblog.com/2018/04/13/...lost-in-space/

This weekend, Netflix is launching a reboot of the campy sixties sci-fi TV series, Lost in Space. You’re probably familiar with the premise, but for any youngsters out there who didn’t watch the original show in endless reruns, it was basically the Swiss Family Robinson in space instead of an island. And yes, I just clarified a pop culture reference with an even older pop culture reference. The show followed the adventures of the Robinson family as they journeyed through space in the far-flung future of 1997.

In the real world, the nineties were flooded with movies based on TV shows that the baby boomers running the studios loved. So one year after the original Robinsons would have been lost in space, New Line Cinema rebooted the show as a big budget movie franchise. But those Lost in Space sequels never materialized and now here we are twenty years later with another take on the old TV show. Why didn’t the movie version of Lost in Space take off?

The original show ran on CBS for three seasons from 1965-1968. I won’t try to sum up its appeal. Let’s just say it was very much of its time. A lot of people who grew up on the show love it for its value as nostalgia. I personally watched the show in reruns as a kid in the seventies, but I didn’t form the same attachment to it that the original audience would have. And that is probably a big reason the Lost in Space movie wasn’t a bigger hit than it was. Baby Boomers loved Lost in Space enough to make it into a movie, but Gen X kind of remembered the robot.

Following the success of movies like The Addams Family and The Fugitive, Hollywood was in a hurry to make as many movies as possible based on old television shows. But not all TV shows were equally suitable for the big screen. Sure, it makes sense to make a movie out of a show like Mission: Impossible. But the nineties saw adaptations of shows like Car 54, Where Are You, Sgt. Bilko and McHale’s Navy. Why?



As a sci-fi adventure, Lost in Space is certainly a candidate for the movie franchise treatment. But the tone of the original series presented a real challenge. It was a deeply silly show. It would be hard to imagine the cynical audiences of the 1990’s turning out for a movie that stayed true to the wholesome tone of the 60’s era show. Conversely, if you ditch all the campiness of the source material, you run the risk of alienating the original show’s fanbase.

The solution was to try to play the movie relatively straight. I say “try” because the ’98 version of Lost in Space veers into comedic territory that I have to assume was unintentional. In order to establish just how serious this new Lost in Space was supposed to be, they cast ultra-serious method actor William Hurt as the leader of the Robinson clan and Gary Oldman as the stowaway who sets their ship off course. Toss in Mimi Rogers as the matriarch of the family and you have a pretty impressive cast.

Unfortunately, the quality didn’t extend to the younger actors. Heather Graham and Lacey Chabert played the Robinsons’ two daughters. Graham was an It Girl at the time and Chabert was a child actor on a popular TV show, so their casting wasn’t completely out of left field, but they aren’t exactly in the same league as Hurt and Oldman.

Most distractingly, Matt LeBlanc was cast as the heroic Major who accompanies the family into space. At the time of the movie’s release, Friends was still early in it’s ten year run and it was impossible to see LeBlanc as anyone other than Joey Tribbiani. He looked positively ridiculous in his space suit.



At the time the movie was made, special effects were in a transitional phase. Lost in Space leaned heavily on the relatively new CGI technology. In it’s primitive stages, CGI could be used effectively to create a liquid metal shape shifter or remove the legs from an actor playing a paraplegic army lieutenant. But they weren’t yet ready to do the things Lost in Space wanted to do like create a space monkey or turn Gary Oldman into a spider.

The movie opened to mostly negative reviews. Critics complained about the lazy writing and uneven tone. Thanks to heavy marketing, Lost in Space opened in first place at the box office finally unseating Titanic from the top spot. That earned the movie bragging rights, but it didn’t exactly qualify Lost in Space as a hit. With a reported budget in the neighborhood of $80 million dollars, its domestic gross of just under $70 million was disappointing. Healthy foreign box office prevented Lost in Space from being a full on flop, but any thoughts of sequels were quickly abandoned.

Of course you can’t keep a familiar intellectual property down. In 2003, there was an aborted pilot for a rebooted Lost in Space TV show that would have been called The Robinsons (not to be confused with any potential spin-off of The Graduate). And now, twenty years after Joey Tribbiani’s space adventures failed to launch a franchise, we have a new Lost in Space to enjoy in the relative safety of TV streaming.