Pixar, Walt Disney Animation and DreamWorks have always been regarded as the so-called ‘Big Three’ when it comes to churning out top quality animated content over the last two decades, although Illumination Entertainment have since put up a convincing argument to make it a quartet after the success of the extended Despicable Me franchise and The Secret Life of Pets, albeit to a much lesser extent with the latter.
However, that doesn’t mean that other studios can’t throw their hats into the ring, although it would be fair to say that the 21st Century efforts to hail from outside the established animation houses have landed somewhere between wildly inconsistent and entirely forgettable. On that note, Brendan Fraser, who recently found himself trending for no other reason than the fact that people truly love the guy, lent his vocal talents to Escape from Planet Earth in 2013, which saw Rainmaker Entertainment team up with The Weinstein Company.
The movie stars Fraser as Scorch Supernova, an intrepid hero who travels to Earth on a rescue mission, but runs into no shortage of trouble when he falls foul of William Shatner’s General Shanker Saunderson, the cantankerous head of Area 51. The voice cast also includes Rob Corddry, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jessica Alba, Craig Robinson, Ricky Gervais, Steve Zahn, Jane Lynch and Sofia Vergara, which is an impressive collection of names for such a mediocre effort.
Escape from Planet Earth could only cobble together $74 million at the box office on a $40 million budget, which is admittedly minuscule by the standards of the genre, and it didn’t fare much better with critics, either. The middling feature holds a 35% score on Rotten Tomatoes, but we’ll see how it plays now that it’s available to stream on Netflix, where it could find a new life given how many people still love Brendan Fraser.
