The Big Picture
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
is the most expensive indie movie ever made.
The film, while visually stunning, rehashes familiar space opera tropes and lacks chemistry.
Despite being a box office failure, the movie showcases the value of creative freedom in filmmaking.
Usually, when you think of independent movies, you don’t think of supermassive productions that are looking to be the next big blockbuster and rake in boatloads of cash. That being said, that’s what the biggest indie movie of all time was trying to be. The film in question is 2017’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, aka the most expensive independent movie ever made. Just watching it, you never would have thought that this movie was made outside of a big studio. Unfortunately, it didn’t end up becoming the blockbuster that it set out to be, nor did it garner the following that its filmmakers probably hoped for. That being said, it’s still an incredible achievement in what a group of artists can do outside the typical Hollywood system and should be praised for its mind-blowing efforts alone.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
A dark force threatens Alpha, a vast metropolis and home to species from a thousand planets. Special operatives Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the marauding menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.
Release Date July 21, 2017
Director Luc Besson
Runtime 136 minutes
‘Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets’ Is the Most Expensive Indie Movie Ever Made
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a 2017 science fiction epic, and a space opera that is based on the classic French comics of the 20th century, Valérian and Laureline. While it is adapted from the comic book medium, don’t expect a Marvel-type movie, heroes with a big “S” emblazoned across their chest, or anything of the sort. No, this Luc Besson-directed saga had its eyes set on being the next Star Wars.
The story of Valerian follows Alpha, a sprawling society that more than a thousand species call home, and the journey of Valerian and Laureline (Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne) as they set out to save their home from an oncoming mysterious threat. Amidst the typical hero’s journey of it all, Valerian showcases vast, imaginative, and beautifully rendered worlds and creatures, gobsmacking visual effects, and enough solid action scenes to make your watch worth its while. However, while Valerian might be an astounding sensory experience, that’s about where its highlights end.
‘Valerian’ Rehashes Previous Space Operas
Outside of being an incredible technical achievement (one that cannot be understated), by the time it’s over, it just ends up feeling a lot more like “Valerian and the Movie of a Thousand Ripoffs.” The world itself, and the idea of Alpha in general, is fresh and exciting. Just the idea of the existence of one thousand species that live in this society, all brought to life with incredible artistry, kicks this movie off with an invigorating and enrapturing start. Sadly, it falls into the typical beats of many other much better space operas. Two characters have to rise up to save their universe from a much larger, mysterious threat — thanks, we’ve all seen it. DeHaan has shown in films like Oppenheimer that he has the potential to kill it, but here, he lacks any real charm. The same goes for his co-lead, Delevingne. The pair has no chemistry, and even on their own merit, they don’t seem to be trying very hard. When you think about the movie that Valerian’s concept could have provided, it becomes a much bigger bummer that this movie turned out as bland as it did.
How Much Money Did ‘Valerian’ Cost to Make?
Image via STX Entertainment
If you look at how much money Valerian made at the box office and have no idea what its budget was, your first instinct might be to call it a success. By the end of its run, Valerian banked $41,189,488 domestically and $184,684,740 internationally, resulting in a total gross of $225,874,228. Hey, that’s a lot of money, right? Well, once you factor in the budget behind City of a Thousand Planets, you might change your mind a little bit. This film, the most expensive indie movie ever made, cost $177,200,000 to produce. Yeah, we’re talking about the big bucks, and that’s not even including the marketing side of things, which can sometimes cost almost as much as the movie itself.
So, what on Earth (or on the City of a Thousand Planets) ramped the cost of this movie up to a production budget of almost $180 million? Well, given that it’s a space opera, the answer is easy. Besson and the many other filmmakers behind Valerian had an entire science fiction universe that they had to generate from the ground up. This film is filled with stunning CGI-rendered worlds, creatures, and action scenes. It’s not hard to figure out where the money went. The soundtrack was also filled out by acclaimed and prolific composer Alexandre Desplat, so there’s another pretty penny. Not only that, there’s a decent number of big names that make up this cast. Valerian doesn’t just star DeHaan and Delevingne, Ethan Hawke is also in this movie, as well as John Goodman, Clive Owen, Elizabeth Debicki, Rutger Hauer, and freaking Rihanna. Yeah, the Rihanna! There’s no way that this movie wasn’t going to be expensive.
Related Luc Besson Discusses ‘DogMan’ and How Caleb Landry Jones Brought the Crew to Tears Luc Besson also shares updates for his Dracula movie starring Jones and Christoph Waltz and his love story ‘June and John’ in this exclusive interview
Despite being a box office failure and generally critically middling, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets should not be a cautionary tale for big filmmakers to make pricey independent efforts. This is a movie where you can feel Luc Besson’s singular vision through and through. Even though it is a massive financial gamble to set out on an endeavor like this, it also guarantees that the artist at hand retains pure creative freedom. That’s endlessly valuable in filmmaking, but is virtually unheard of in big-budget science fiction movies, especially because most of them are done in the studio landscape. Besson’s practice here can’t be replicated often, but for the sake of potentially creating the next highly imaginative fictional worlds, hopefully, someone someday sets out with similar gargantuan ambitions.
Only the biggest movies that hit theaters cost as much as Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and this one did it independently. This might have put many people millions of dollars behind, but it at least rang true that independent films don’t just have to be quaint, simple productions. If you band enough people together and raise enough money, then a group of artists can come through with a vision that is wholly their own. Box office earnings don’t represent true success — artistic freedom does.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is available to stream on Prime Video in the U.S.
Watch on Prime