Has Hollywood lost interest in making sci-fi movies for adults?
A decade ago, Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi thriller Gravity soared into theaters, to ecstatic reviews and a vast box office. Its success was all the more surprising — and welcome — because it had been dogged by reports of disastrous test screenings and production chaos, with its innovative, visual effects-heavy story apparently beset by the envelope-pushing demands of the technology that it required to depict its world. The movie could easily have been a colossal flop, but instead it seemed to herald a brave new dawn for ambitious, intelligent science fiction filmmaking that soared into the stratosphere, in both senses. Ten years on, the success of Gravity, or even Ridley Scott’s The Martian, are very distant memories.
