By Hollywood veteran and Roland Emmerich’s former collaborator Dean Devlin is well known for writing and producing on films like “Stargate” and “Independence Day” to creating and running TV shows like “The Librarians” and “Leverage”.
He has dabbled in directing though, making his feature debut with 2017’s Gerard Butler-led disaster epic “Geostorm” which scored scathing reviews and flopped – grossing only $221.6 million worldwide against a $120–$130 million budget.
The film, which follows a satellite designer trying to save the world from a storm of epic proportions caused by hijacked climate-controlling satellites, bombed to the point of costing the studio approximately $71.6 million.
After testing poorly in late 2015, Devlin was sidelined and $15 million worth of reshoots took place in Louisiana a year later. Danny Cannon took over as director while producer Jerry Bruckheimer and writer Laeta Kalogridis came onboard to ‘salvage’ it.
Out promoting the second season of his sci-fi series “The Ark,” he spoke with Inverse and got fairly candid about the problems with “Geostorm”. He reveals more than half the film was re-written and re-shot without him. Even so, he’d love to bring his original vision of it 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.”
The film came out at a time when disaster films were decidedly on the wane, and even critically well-regarded titles like “Deepwater Horizon” flopped – losing the studio an amount estimated anywhere from as little as $60 million to as high as $110 million.
“Geostorm” is available on digital storefronts and on Netflix in some territories.
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