The strange saga of Jupiter Ascending, Eddie Redmayne's $210 million cosmic flop

Yahoo

06-02-2025

In 2015, the actor Eddie Redmayne accomplished a rare double achievement. He was awarded Best Actor at the Oscars for his performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. Yet shortly before he received the award, the Wachowskis' eagerly awaited, big-budget sci-fi epic Jupiter Ascending was released, in which he played the lead villain, Balem Abrasax.
There was only one problem – Redmayne, whether through poor direction or perverse choice, wasn't a charismatic baddie or even a guilty pleasure. He was just dire. He was duly given another award, for Worst Supporting Actor, at that year's Golden Raspberry Awards, or 'Razzies'.
As scripted, Abrasax is a fairly rote Jupiter-dwelling, world-dominating villain, bent on harvesting Earth's resources, only to be foiled by Mila Kunis's feisty housekeeper who also happens – it's very much that sort of film – to be Jupiter's rightful owner. Yet Redmayne made a bold but deeply misguided decision when it came to the role. 'My character had had his larynx ripped out by this wolf man, and so I made the slightly bold choice, which I thought was right, of talking like this for the whole film.'
The overall effect, especially given that Redmayne is a fine actor but not the most physically threatening of figures, is laughable, rather like watching a sixth-former with a bad cold doing an imitation of Laurence Olivier playing Richard III. He claimed that the voice 'sort of suited the costumes and the extremity of the world' but also acknowledged in retrospect, 'it may have been too much'.
Ten years on from its initial release, Jupiter Ascending is now remembered as a baffling failure – a huge-budgeted sci-fi epic that should have been the next Matrix, and didn't even manage to be the next Prometheus. Its leading actors have all but disowned the picture and the Wachowskis, who were once seen as the most visionary directorial duo in Hollywood, haven't worked together since. What happened?
When Jeff Robinov ran Warner Brothers, the studio that made Jupiter Ascending, he had a rare eye for talent. Robinov was responsible for nurturing and building careers that included those of Christopher Nolan, Alfonso Cuarón and the Wachowskis.
The Wachowskis' first Matrix film was released in 1999 and instantly became a phenomenon, a preview of what audiences might expect in the new millennium. It was a souped-up combination of undergraduate philosophy, Hong Kong cinema-influenced fight scenes and 'bullet time', a groundbreaking special effects technique which saw its leather-clad characters freeze time. The Wachowskis were the golden gods of cult cinema, and could do no wrong.
Unfortunately, the next two Matrix films made it quite clear that there was no further overarching narrative idea, merely a series of arresting images and ideas strung together with increasingly hokey philosophising. By the time that Robinov approached the pair in 2009 – after the conspicuous failure of their Manga adaptation, Speed Racer – they needed a seismic hit.
At first, all the ingredients for Jupiter Ascending to be that comeback appeared to be there. The Wachowskis talked enthusiastically about a quest narrative that would encompass aspects of both The Wizard of Oz and The Odyssey, and the discussions with Robinov went on while they shot their passion project, the David Mitchell adaptation Cloud Atlas.
Inevitably, Cloud Atlas flopped at the box office, but it was always a long shot for commercial success, being a structural nightmare with recurring appearances by A-list actors in a variety of guises, some distinctly un-PC in nature. The film attracted particular criticism for the decidedly Caucasian Jim Sturgess playing a futuristic Korean character in what looked suspiciously like yellowface, for Tom Hanks's borderline xenophobic caricature as an Irish gangster and whatever Hugh Grant was supposed to be as a futuristic cannibal.
Nonetheless, Robinov continued to have faith in his protegees, and Jupiter Ascending began production in April 2013. Yet Robinov was then unceremoniously ousted as studio president by Warner Brothers Chairman Kevin Tsujihara in June that year after being passed over for the CEO position that he was expected to assume, which instead went to Tsujihara in a typical display of boardroom politics. He was replaced by not one but three executives – Sue Kroll, Toby Emmerich and Greg Silverman – none of whom were as enamoured by the Wachowkis' folie de grandeur as he had been.
Jupiter Ascending was far too expensive simply to cancel, especially as it was already deep into production. It had begun with a budget of $130 million, which was a huge amount for an original film without existing intellectual property. Shortly though, rumours had begun to trickle out that, rather than the next billion-grossing franchise that Warners had hoped for, the film was rather strange. Channing Tatum, the most bankable name, was playing the male lead, named Caine Wise, but his character was half-man, half-dog: less dashing hero and more a refugee from Tod Browning's Freaks.
And this would-be animal magic continued throughout the cast, too. Sean Bean was cast as the Han Solo-esque Stinger (half honeybee) and Gugu Mbatha-Raw's villainous Famulus was half-fawn. It is tempting to imagine that, when the new suits saw what they had been stung into committing their $200 million to, their response was rather stronger than deer, oh deer.
Filming also proved to be an unpleasant and gruelling experience. This was in large part because the Wachowskis, fired up by using practical effects rather than CGI in Cloud Atlas, attempted to use the same techniques here, on a far bigger canvas. Actors and stuntmen were required to perform action scenes for real, rather than with digital doubles, leading to several hazardous near-misses. Tatum said, before the film came out, that 'Mila almost had an unfortunate meeting three or four times with a camera or two.' He subsequently admitted that 'Jupiter Ascending was a nightmare from the jump. It was a sideways movie. All of us were there for seven months, busting our hump. It was just tough.'
The film was originally intended for a prime summer slot in 2014, and in a mark of Warners' initial confidence, its release was even moved up a week, from July 25 to July 18. Tatum and Kunis gamely began publicising it, but then, at the beginning of June, Warners announced that they were pulling it from release and rescheduling for the following February, traditionally a dumping ground for unsuccessful pictures.
The ostensible reason was that the Wachowskis needed more time to refine the special effects, but a dismal test screening in April 2014 meant that bad buzz had begun to circulate around Jupiter Ascending already. It did not help that Robinov had granted the Wachowskis final cut, which they refused to relinquish – the film's success, or failure, now lay entirely in their hands, backed by more money from Warners.
As one studio insider told Deadline, 'When you're in the hole for $100m-plus on a film, you're not just going to release it on VOD. You're going to fix it.' It is estimated that the film needed as much as an extra $80 million to make it releasable, resulting in a total cost of $210 million.
Unfortunately, the additional budget, star names and visionary world-building failed to excite audiences. A secret screening was held in late January 2015 at the Sundance Film Festival, to build social media buzz ahead of the film's release, but it failed entirely. Not only were there empty seats at the screening, but many attendees walked out, unimpressed by the barrage of noise and sound, to say nothing of Eddie Redmayne's idiosyncratic vocal delivery. As one of the festival's volunteers said, 'I hated it… it's just ridiculous.' By the time it opened in American cinemas on February 6, to a disappointing opening weekend gross of $18 million, its status as a high-profile failure was assured. Reviews were not kind, with David Edelstein of Vulture calling it 'inane from the first frame to last... It's miraculously unmiraculous.'
The suspicion remains that, had Robinov, or anyone else, got through to the duo and suggested that they remove the self-indulgent weirdness and turned the picture into a fun, unpretentious B-movie, it would have been considerably more entertaining. There are occasional bright spots, such as a bureaucracy montage, complete with Terry Gilliam cameo, that turns into a fun homage to Brazil, and suggests what might have been. Alas, over its near-interminable 127 minutes (it feels longer), Jupiter Ascending descends into a very dark place indeed.
Kunis has many skills as an actress but 'action heroine' is not necessarily one – let alone dowdy maid – and she has little chemistry with an embarrassed-looking Tatum, who seems perpetually to be on the verge of calling his agent to be removed from this intergalactic farrago. The plotting is simultaneously over-complex – a Wachowski trademark – and patronisingly simplistic. Had Redmayne been a fun baddie, that might have been a redeeming feature, but unfortunately he was possibly the single worst aspect of a deeply regrettable waste of money and time.
Warners duly ended their relationship with the Wachowskis, and nobody else seems particularly interested in giving them hundreds of millions of dollars for another picture of this kind. Although they have both gone onto separate projects – Lana made an irrelevant fourth Matrix film, Resurrections, and Lilly wrote and directed several episodes of the sitcom Work in Progress – Jupiter Ascending feels like a film from another time, a big-budget misfire from filmmakers operating with too much power and not enough responsibility.
'I hate my life,' Kunis's downtrodden Jupiter moans early in the picture. Audiences fortunate enough to escape this ordeal will know exactly what she means.