Delayed Reaction: Mars Needs Moms

Premise: A boy stowaways on a spaceship after Martians stole his mom.

 

If you asked me to describe the biggest box office bombs, my first instinct would be to say they are attempts at franchises that studios overinvested in that fully fell apart. Disney alone has John Carter, The Long Ranger, and my beloved Tomorrowland toward the top of the list* that all fit the description. There are also movies that make you wonder why the star or director were ever given that much money like Cutthroat Island, Battleship, or The Adventures of Pluto Nash. A little further down the list, there are the last gasps of franchises like Terminator: Dark Fate and Dark Phoenix. The movies that aren't that discussed are the animated movies. Many of the biggest financial failures in cinema are animated films that tried technology (normally motion-capture) that ballooned the cost and audiences weren't ready for. Remember Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Sears, Titan A.E., Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and A Christmas Carol (the Zemeckis one)? Those are all among the very worst bombs ever. So is Mars Needs Moms.

 

*For all the talk of Disney dominating the box office these days, they still make a number of large and pricy gambles on movies.

 

I remember Mars Needs Moms almost like a fever dream. I saw exactly one trailer for it. It looked bad. I figured it was one of those cheap Disney Toon movies they were releasing to game the Oscars nominations*. In my mind, this was confirmed when I didn't hear about the movie again for a long time. There must've been some delays in its release that even the Wikipedia page doesn't care to mention. By the time it was released in 2011, it was dead on arrival and one of the biggest flops in history.

 

*The Oscars only give 5 nominations for Animated Feature if a certain number of animated movies are released that year, so Disney does what they can to inflate those numbers by releasing some straight-to-DVD movies to theaters for a couple weeks first to make them eligible.

 

Simply put, this movie is bad. The animation looks weird. Director Simon Wells is a disciple of producer Robert Zemeckis and is just as enamored with this motion capture technology. The uncanny valley is real in this movie. I'm not sure why Disney put so much money into this. It's not like Zemeckis' mo-cap movies had done well before this. The Polar Express only made profit through yearly re-releases that creeped out a new set of children each year. Everything else lost big though. Why would Disney expect differently without Zemeckis even directing it?

 

I doubt this movie would've succeeded even with traditional animation. The premise is really strained and insulting to basically everyone. So, the idea is that the men in Martian society are oafs who the women kick out to the slums of the planet. The female Martians that rule society though don't know how to take care of their children. So, they abduct mothers from Earth and suck out their parenting acumen to load into nannybots, killing the mother. Ignoring how incredibly grim that is, how did no one making this movie realize the myriad ways this movie would be misinterpreted? It suggests fathers are insignificant. It implies that mothers who work are the villains. It seems to be saying that the correct way to raise a child is full time care by a parent or nanny. Was this based on a book written in the '50s? That's smart. Make a movie attacking fathers, working parents, and anyone who can't afford full-time care for their kid. I don't think that was the intent of the movie, but that's certainly how it reads.

 

And, let's not forget that the movie just isn't very good. Like, it's not very funny. They mo-capped Seth Green for the lead performance then didn't even use his voice, despite using him in the blooper reel. I know I should've turned this part of my brain off, but none of the logic about Mars made sense. All humans need are helmets, I guess. No need to shield the rest of the body, and losing the helmet is just like being underwater for a little while. Once you get a helmet back on, you can breathe again. Sure, that makes sense.

 

This is rightfully a box office disaster that Disney should and does hide from.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend