Cara Delevingne’s Flop Of A Sci-Fi Movie Is Suddenly Doing Great On Streaming
Cara Delevingne starred in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, now in Amazon's top ten.
Cara Delevingne made the jump from world-class supermodel to actor gaining critical acclaim for Carnival Row with Orlando Bloom, and even notching a superhero film with Suicide Squad. Though she’s had plenty of hits, there’s one flop that stands out above the rest of her filmography: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. According to FlixPatrol, the sci-fi flop is now in the top ten on Amazon Prime Video.
Based on a French comic series, Valerian and Laureline, by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mezieres that ran from 1967 to 2010. The comic is credited with influencing modern sci-fi, from everything including Star Wars to The Fifth Element, while it shares the same optimistic view on humanity and the future as Star Trek. Despite the decades of source material, or perhaps because of how dense it is, Cara Delevingne’s starring role as Laureline is the biggest money-loser on her resume.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is the record-holder for the most expensive European film ever made, with a budget of $223 million. While the majority of the budget went toward the special effects, with 2,734 individual visual-effect shots in the film, a good chunk was also devoted to the cast. For a high-concept sci-fi movie based on a comic book, Cara Delevingne had some amazing co-stars, including Dane DeHaan as Valerian, with Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Rutger Hauer, and John Goodman.
The film followed DeHaan and Cara Delevingne’s characters as they investigate a telepathic message from the planet Mul, just one of the thousands housed within Alpha, the former International Space Station that now houses multiple dimensions worth of planets. As members of the United Human Federation’s peace-keeping force, Valerian and Laureline are tasked with responding to disturbances among the billions of inhabitants. Needless to say, what starts as a simple mission to find a sci-fi McGuffin gets embroiled with government cover-ups, betrayals, long-lost secrets, and revelations about the true cost of living in Alpha.
Critics panned the film for its plot, praising the incredible visuals and kinetic energy that remained more than a few of director Luc Besson’s other works, The Fifth Element and Lucy. Cara Delevingne managed to avoid the worst of the criticisms, with the blame for the lackluster story being tossed solely at Besson’s feet. It wasn’t just the critics that disliked the movie, as the audience failed to show up and watch the spectacle, which may sound strange considering how much money the flop really took home.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets earned $40 million in North America and $180 million internationally, which, in today’s terms, makes it more successful than Shazam: Fury of the Gods and Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Yet, the budget was $223 million, and that’s not counting marketing, which was one of the most expensive campaigns in movie history. Cara Delevingne did her best to promote the film to her sizable social media following, but even with one of the most popular models on the planet as a lead, the costly mistakes added up and were too much to overcome.
For starters, the film’s trailer included the Beatles’ song “Because,” marking the first time that one of their songs was used for marketing a non-Beatle film, and as everyone knows, they are one of the most expensive bands in the world to license. Other trailers featured Coolio’s “Gangsta Paradise,” a significantly cheaper song to use. Secondly, as an international production, the film was heavily marked globally and not targeted to just a few of the major markets, meaning that no matter how well Cara Delevinge performed, it would be nearly impossible to break even on the production.
Today, Cara Delevingne’s fan-favorite series, Carnival Row, has wrapped up its second and final season, while her next film, The Climb, is significantly smaller in scale than her genre work. The upcoming heist movie involves a group of friends that climb London’s Shard, a 72-story skyscraper. After that, she’ll star with Machine Gun Kelly in Punk, about one man’s road trip across America.
The failure of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets hasn’t stopped it from amassing a cult following in the last few years. Cara Delevingne and Dane DeHaan’s performance is compared to that of Bruce Willis and Milia Jovovich in The Fifth Element, which in the world of cult hit sci-fi movies, is high praise.
