The Adventures of Pluto Nash: A Few Thoughts

The Adventures of Pluto Nash, to the extent that the movie is discussed at all, is remembered as a flop of historic proportions--a $100 million production (back in 2002, when $100 million was more like $170 million today) that made a grand total of $7 million at the box office worldwide before lapsing into an oblivion from which it has not been rescued. (So far as I can tell this film didn't even get the consolation prize of "cult hit" status.)

I will not claim that the movie is an unjustly overlooked masterpiece. But what I think can fairly be said for the film is that it is in some ways unique as such big-budget, A-list-starring Hollywood films go.

After all, consider what we have in the film--a pulpy action-comedy about gangsters on the moon in 2087. Granted, since Star Wars we have seen a great many space-themed movies, some of them set in a future not entirely unlike this one--but they are usually save-the-Earth or save-the-galaxy epics, or if more cerebral in nature, have a big "What if?" at their center. We may see something of an underworld in outer space, but Han Solo's problems with Jabba the Hutt are distinctly minor next to the saga of Luke Skywalker and the Rebel Alliance against the Galactic Empire (as we were reminded again when Disney-Lucasfilm bet on a big Solo movie and pretty much wrecked its grand plans for making of Star Wars a Marvel-style movie machine). However here the (onetime) smuggler who is looking to hold on to his operation and his life in the face of a threat from a powerful crime boss is the whole story in a piece of that kind of science fiction that sets a less than epic-scale and more or less contemporary story in a future of zap guns and androids and lunar resorts and clones mainly for the fun to be had playing with these devices, rather than because they are looking to tell us what tomorrow will actually be like, or trying to use the tools of science fiction to show us something about reality in a way they cannot through plain old "realist" storytelling.

As those attentive to the actual history of science fiction are aware such tales have been the bread and butter of the genre as a commercial enterprise, and what provided space for the more cerebral stuff, too. However, as the box office receipts and subsequent legacy of this film showed this kind of thing is not so easy to sell to a general audience. (I suspect the sci-fi elements entail too much "alienation effect" for them to get into a smaller, non-epic like this in the "dramatic" way it requires.) The unsurprising result is that Hollywood's executives haven't exactly made a lot more major features like it since. In fact, as of 2025 I can't think of a single one.