Trivia / Mars Needs Moms

• Box Office Bomb: The film proceeded to tank big-time on its opening weekend, and is now officially one of the biggest box office bombs ever and one of the two finalists to be the biggest animated box office bomb of all time. It scored the 12th worst opening for any film opening in 3,000+ theaters ($6 million) and suffered a net loss of over $110 million due to its $150 million budget and grossing only $39 million worldwide even with 3D grosses. Disney shut down ImageMovers Digital shortly before it was released.
• Completely Different Title: The French and Italian translations altered the Audience-Alienating Premise title into Milo on Mars, while the German one uses the very similar Milo and Mars.
• Creator Killer:
  • The spectacular failure of the film led to Disney shuttering Robert Zemeckis' mo-cap animation studio ImageMovers Digital (a division of Zemeckis' production company ImageMovers) and canceling their next projects, including a remake of Yellow Submarine, a sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Calling All Robots, a Genre Throwback to Kaiju films to have been directed by Trick 'r Treat director Michael Dougherty.
  • As Zemeckis was only a producer on the film, his career was spared. The same can not be said for co-writer/director and DreamWorks Animation alumnus Simon Wells, who has not directed or written another film since this one (and his screen credits past this are as a story artist for DWA's films), and co-producers (and Zemekis' frequent collaborators) Steve Starkey and Jack Rapke, whose careers began fading off of Earth over the next year barring ImageMovers projects.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: In the Japanese dub, Milo is played by a little girl.
• Dear Negative Reader: Seth Green said that he fielded very harsh questions from film critics and the press during the promotional tour, all of whom had very negative opinions on previous ImageMovers films like The Polar Express. Seth felt a lot of the criticisms were unfair, due to his belief that Robert Zemeckis was able to improve with motion capture animation significantly since that film.
• The Other Marty: Seth Green, who does the motion capture for Milo, was supposed to voice the character as well. However, the producers felt his attempt at voicing a little kid didn't sound too good, so Milo's lines were re-dubbed by the much younger Seth Dusky.
• Real-Life Relative: Writer Simon Wells wrote the movie with his wife Wendy and their daughters Meredith and Teigan provide voices of the Hatchlings.
• Trend Killer: The failure of Mars Needs Moms resulted in the death of full-form motion capture animation. However, Serkis Folk mo-cap animation for live-action features is still very much alive and well.
• Troubled Production: According to Seth Green, there was a lot of backdoor politics going on over the film being distributed by Disney, because Pixar felt that ImageMovers Digital were encroaching on their territory.
• What Could Have Been: Due to the box office disaster this film left us with, ImageMovers cancelled all of the other films ImageMovers Digital had planned out such as a film based on The Nutcracker, a Who Framed Roger Rabbit sequel, a Yellow Submarine remake and a Kaiju Genre Throwback film named Calling All Robots.

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