The film “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” by Luc Besson, considered his most ambitious film but also his biggest box office failure, is now available on Netflix!
We can reproach Luc Besson for many things as a filmmaker, but on the other hand we cannot take away from him the ambition he has shown at the head of his company EuropaCorp.
In 2017, the director sees the completion of a long-standing project with the release of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, an adaptation of comic books Valerian and Laureline by Jean-Claude Mézières and Pierre Christin.
Entirely produced in its studios in Saint-Denis, Valérian and the City of a Thousand Planets has brought together an international cast, notably composed of Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne in the roles of Valérian and Laureline but also Rihanna, Clive Owen, Ethan Hawke and d a totally unrecognizable Alain Chabat.
To achieve his vision of the project, Luc Besson does not hesitate to take all the risks by mounting a budget of 197 million euros – a record, by far, for a French film. In France, the public is waiting for you with more than four million entries. Internationally, however, the story gets more complicated…
Neither profit nor loss
The film collected only 232 million dollars in the world, thus allowing Valérian to generate neither profits nor losses. The idea of a sequel was raised by the filmmaker, but this project no longer seems relevant following the sale of his company EuropaCorp to an American investment fund in 2020.
The most expensive blockbuster ever produced in France therefore failed to compete with the Marvel and DC Comics teams as Luc Besson hoped, but the “cursed” film label that now sticks to Valerian and the City of a Thousand planets, however, seems severe, not to say totally unfair.
Who knows if the arrival of the film today in the Netflix catalog will not rehabilitate the image of the adaptation of comics Valerian and Laureline in the eyes of the general public?