#348: Mars Attacks!

Release Date: December 13th, 1996

Format: Streaming (Tubi)

Written by: Jonathan Gems

Directed by: Tim Burton

4 Stars

Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! carries the notable distinction of being both a great movie and a commercial failure. Watching it this morning for the first time in…geez, I don’t know how long, I had a stupid smile on my face throughout, even though I still remembered what a disappointment this film was for audiences back in 1996. 

We didn’t know it at the time, but Mars Attacks! signalled the end of the Golden Age of Tim Burton. After this came Sleepy Hollow, an okay but mostly unambitious reunion with Johnny Depp, and then Planet of the Apes, a commercial success, yes, but more importantly a warning sign that Burton was about to run out of creative juice. Beginning with Apes, the films started to feel less personal and much, much lazier.  

By the 2010s, the former SoCal goth wunderkind who brought us Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Batman, and Edward Scissorhands seemed like a distant memory. He lost his voice, and American popular culture passed him by.

In hindsight, you can see hints of his decline in Mars Attacks!’s box office performance. It wasn’t a flop necessarily, but it opened at #2 and barely made $9 million its opening weekend (against a reported massive $100 million budget). The next weekend Beavis and Butt-Head Do America opened at #1 and made $20 million (on a $12 million budget); Mars Attacks! slipped all the way to #7. It was clearly a career misstep by the Baby Boomer Burton: Gen X didn’t much care about Mars Attacks!, which was more or less a love letter to the kitschy ‘50s sci-fi B-movies of Burton’s youth, and the emerging Millenials didn’t know what the hell it was. We clearly preferred watching a cruddy cartoon about two high school burnouts who sit on their couch and watch MTV and talk about their boners.

Another aspect working against Mars Attacks! was its gleeful nihilism. Featuring a huge ensemble cast with some of the most beloved actors of the ‘90s (where do I begin?: Nicholson, Close, Benning, Brosnan, DeVito, Short, Jessica Parker, Fox, Portman, not to mention ‘70s icons Jim Brown, Tom Jones, and Rod Steiger), audiences simply did not like seeing them killed for laughs by invading green Martians. Not only was it not funny to you average cinema goer, but it felt like Burton was being mean. The ironic tone was lost in translation.

That’s too bad, because Mars Attacks! is incredibly funny and entertaining. Audiences were wrong back then. I say with confidence that it belongs in that upper tier of Burton classics, even if it still carries that whiff of commercial failure from 30 years ago.