While 65 has proven a flop with critics and viewers alike, this is not the first (or even the second time) that sci-fi movies that combine two disparate concepts have alienated audiences. 65 is a science-fiction action thriller written by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. This screenwriting duo is best known for the post-apocalyptic blockbuster that they penned, A Quiet Place. However, while A Quiet Place became a massive critical and commercial success due to its ingeniously simple premise, the complicated conceit of 65 ended up driving audiences away from the Adam Driver vehicle.
Where A Quiet Place offered viewers a straightforward story (a family must survive in a wasteland filled with sound-sensitive man-eating monsters), 65’s pitch was a little more complex. The story of 65, Driver’s first big box office failure, revolves around an astronaut who crash-lands on a mysterious planet populated with unseen creatures. The twist—which was revealed by 65’s earliest trailers—is that he has landed on earth 65 million years ago, and the monsters he is trying to evade are dinosaurs. Unfortunately for Beck and Woods, this idea has been explored before and has never proven profitable.
65 Is The Third Dinosaur/Time Travel Movie Flop Since 2005
65’s release marks not the first, not the second, but the third time in 2 decades that an expensive sci-fi project combining dinosaurs and time travel has flopped disastrously. 65 has failed with audiences and critics alike, just like Land of the Lost did in 2009 and The Sound of Thunder did in 2005. While Land of the Lost offered a comedic, self-aware spin on the “dinosaurs meets time travel” conceit, The Sound of Thunder was a more straightforward blockbuster thriller in the vein of 65. Admittedly, the three movies differed in terms of how their time travel stories played out and how they set up their dinosaur encounters.
However, The Sound of Thunder, 65, and Land of the Lost all had one thing in common. They all attempted to fuse two genre mainstays and failed to find an audience in the process. The phenomenal financial success of Jurassic World: Dominion’s silly plot proves that audiences don’t mind dinosaur movies that stretch credulity, while time travel has been a staple of major hit movies in the genre for decades. However, it seems that viewers can’t stand seeing the two tropes in the same movie, much like sci-fi stories that combine western tropes with the genre or horror-specific elements sometimes fail too.
Why Too Many Sci-Fi Movie Concepts Ruin Blockbusters
It is hard to see why 65’s problem keeps recurring. One reason could be that a sci-fi franchise can either have time travel (The Terminator, Back to the Future) or dinosaurs (Jurassic Park) but not both at once (a little like the critical failures of Cowboys Vs Aliens or Ghosts of Mars). However, the success of Jordan Peele’s Nope proves that Western sci-fi mashups can work, while the success of the Alien franchise proves horror and sci-fi can also blend well. As such, it remains a mystery why time travel and dinosaurs obstinately do not mix, although 65 proves that the formula still guarantees financial failure for sci-fi movies.
