Trivia / Lucy in the Sky

• Box Office Bomb: Budget: $27 million. Box office: $319,976. The film opened up $81,612 at the box office over its first week.
• Dueling Works:
  • The second half of 2019 was packed with films about astronauts who have family/relationship issues, with Astronaut (starring Richard Dreyfuss), Ad Astra, Lucy in the Sky and Proxima. Ad Astra came on top of them all critically and box office-wise (although it's still a bomb).
    • Both Ad Astra and Lucy in the Sky were produced by Fox and released after the buyout by Disney. Ad Astra had a much better critical reception and box office intake (though still a bomb, just a less staggering one).
    • Both Lucy in the Sky and Proxima premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival and have a female protagonist. Proxima got a much better critical reception (78% on Rotten Tomatoes) than Lucy in the Sky (22%), in the end.
  • With the film opening the same weekend as Joker, some reviewers drew comparisons between the leads of the two films, who each spend the film losing their grip on reality, struggling to function in society and spinning toward a dramatic climactic crime. Both films also feature Zazie Beetz in similar supporting roles. Lucy director Noah Hawley even commented on the two films.
    Noah Hawley: “They’re both movies about characters who have a psychological decline that ends in violence, but he gets to be Joker with a capital J and she’s just supposed to be a joke... Obviously that movie is part of a larger comic book universe at a moment in which comic book movies are the currency, so it is going to be looked at in a very different light. Often, as a filmmaker I think about, [how] it’s not just the power of one image, it’s the power of two images side by side. The power of these two movies coming out simultaneously, and the one that’s going to earn $155 million the first weekend… I think that we need more thoughtful movies about the problems that people have on this earth and have less violence in them. That’s probably a pretty good solution.”

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