Not my clowns, not my circus! That is Dean Devlin’s view of Geostorm. Roland Emmerich’s former collaborator Dean Devlin (Stargate, Independence Day) was credited as the director of the movie, but he wants nothing to do with it.
2017 disaster flick Geostorm starred Gerard Butler as an astronaut and satellite designer trying to save the world from a storm of epic proportions that has been caused by his climate-controlling satellites and nefarious people.
Test screening results were not good, so Devlin was sidelined and $15 million worth of reshoots took place down in Louisiana. Danny Cannon came in as emergency director, and the studio sent for Jerry Bruckheimer to run a salvage job. He brought writer Laeta Kalogridis on board.
The movie eventually flopped, earning just $222 million worldwide against a circa $130 million budget. Outside the US it was mostly punted direct to streaming. I saw it once, can’t remember a damn thing about it.
Now, while doing publicity for sci-fi series The Ark, he dropped some comments during an interview with Inverse and didn’t hold back:
“We barely survived Geostorm. The truth of the matter is I was replaced on Geostorm. Someone else rewrote and redirected 60% of the movie. So it’s not my film. If they ever want to go back and restore my version of the film, I’d be happy to do that, and I’d be happy to go do a sequel to that.”
Geostorm had its genesis in a conversation Devlin had with his daughter about climate change and she asked why a machine could not be built to fix that. Devlin went on to imagine such a thing, and how it could be used for evil purposes.
In 2013, Skydance Productions purchased the filming rights. After Skydance’s distributing partner Paramount Pictures put the project into turnaround, Geostorm was pitched and accepted by Warner Bros.
I feel some strange urge to now revisit this movie. Who is with me? You guys??? Where did everybody go…