Animation powerhouse Pixar has developed a habit for turning tortured productions into critical and commercial gold, but the behind the scenes issues to plague Wonder Park ended in nothing but complete failure and abject disaster.
It may not have been a project of the Disney-owned behemoth’s making, but first-time director Dylan Brown was still a Pixar veteran who’d worked on The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, Monsters Inc., and Toy Story to name but a few. However, his feature-length debut couldn’t have gone much worse on both a personal and professional level.
Wonder Park began production in the latter months of 2014, but it didn’t land in theaters until March of 2019. Between those two points, Brown was fired from the film following an investigation into “inappropriate and unwanted conduct,” but that wasn’t even the end of it.
Paramount then offered the credit to several other creative personnel, and every single one of them turned it down because they believed being associated with Wonder Park would be damaging to their careers, so the family-friendly frolic was released with nobody named as the director – which is virtually unheard of.
Adding insult to injury, the $100 million adventure then tanked at the box office by earning less than $120 million, and was panned by critics to pour just a little bit more salt into the wound. Oh, and this all came before an entire 20-episode spin-off series was completed and then tossed onto the scrapheap, making Wonder Park arguably the biggest disaster you’ve never heard of.
Or at least, that was the case up until now, seeing as FlixPatrol has revealed the cursed failure as one of Netflix’s most-watched films, even if the history behind Wonder Park is a great deal more interesting than the end product.
Published: Jun 3, 2023 02:30 am