Today it is considered a modern classic of science fiction cinema, but ‘Gattaca’ was a tremendous hit at the box office when it was released 25 years ago. Released in theaters in the United States in October 1997, the feature debut of Andrew Nickolalso responsible for titles such as ‘In Time’, which he came to describe as a bastard daughter of ‘Gattaca’, or ‘The Host (The guest)’, sank with revenues of just 12 million dollars when it had cost 36, what happened?
An inevitable failure?
To understand the failure of ‘Gattaca’, several factors must be taken into account. The first of these is that the film was not really going to be titled that way and Niccol had no choice but to come up with a word that simply sounded strange to the public at the time.
The truth is that the film was shot with the idea of being titled ‘The Eighth Day’, but a Belgian film released in 1996 was already called that. That forced them to dispense with the biblical reference, since God created the world in six days, he rested on the seventh and it is supposed to be on the eighth when human beings began to touch things, so Niccol opted for a combination of the four nucleotides of DNAas he himself explained:
Guanine, Adenine, Thymine and Cytosine. The society in the film has adopted that sequence as the name of their city, a kind of tribute to genetics. So it’s the name of the city, and a corporation, and I suppose you could also say a state of mind.
Then another problem arose, and that is that it seems that Sony did not trust the film too much. Ethan Hawkethe great protagonist of the function, affirmed it emphatically years after its premiere:
I know the studio head at the time didn’t think it was too good. He didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it, so it was released in theaters without much promotion.
A film already difficult to sell without advertising support and released a little to get rid of it? The failure was inevitable, but something curious also happened: Sony did do some promotion, but the greater success of his campaign did not benefit the film at all.
Apparently, Sony launched a campaign that implied that those who called the number included in the ad would have the possibility of genetically engineering their babies. Many people believed that he was serious and tried to get this curious service.
His influence and later recognition
The interest in ‘Gattaca’ grew over the years – the great success of ‘The Truman Show’, also written by Niccol, the following year helped it -, but one of its greatest achievements is that it revived a proposal of law in the United States that ended up being decisive so that the future that the film showed would never become a reality. I mean GINA.
GINA is the acronym for the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act, whose first version was presented in the United States in 1995, three years before the premiere of ‘Gattaca’, but it was not until after its launch when it started to gain traction until it was finally approved in 2008. The purpose of this law is to protectindividuals from discrimination based on their individual genetic information in regards to health insurance and employment“, which in its own way could be interpreted as not being able to discriminate between Valid and Invalid…
The interest of the scientific community in the film has gone beyond that and it is constantly mentioned when there is some kind of debate about the issues it addresses, but perhaps its greatest achievement was that NASA chose it as the most popular science fiction film. plausible of all time above titles like ‘Contact’, ‘metropolis’, ‘Ultimatum on Earth’, ‘The Woman on the Moon’‘The enigma of another world’ and ‘Jurassic Park’.
In Espinof: