The pandemic era has seen countless titles under-perform at the box office, giving the vast majority of them a ready-made excuse for not living up to expectations. That doesn’t really apply to Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, though, which fared so badly in theaters that not only is it indisputably the biggest box office disaster of 2022, it’s also one of the heftiest flops in history.
The filmmaker has been struggling to recapture his mojo for a long time now, and the high-profile failure of his return to blowing sh*t up on a global scale has left many people thinking that his professional decline is incapable of being halted. It’s now been 13 years since the Master of Disaster scored a certifiable smash hit, with Moonfall following in the footsteps of Anonymous, Stonewall, White House Down, Independence Day: Resurgence, and Midway by disappointing.
One of the most expensive independent films ever made, the sci-fi spectacular couldn’t even reach $60 million globally on a budget reported to be hovering around $140 million, never mind the additional marketing and distribution costs. Moonfall even had the gall to end on a sequel-baiting tease, with history repeating itself after Independence Day 2 did the same thing and went nowhere.
However, the optimists of Reddit have been picking through the cosmic bones of the stupendously silly slice of escapism, and you might be shocked to discover that not only is there a Moonfall fan club, but many of them are willing to die on the hill that it’s underrated.
Admittedly, there are a couple of impressive action sequences, while the entire cast knows that they’re starring in something thunderingly stupid and wisely decide to pitch their performances as such. The overriding sentiment from these dedicated supporters is that Moonfall delivers “CGI destruction porn” capable of putting a smile on the faces of its supporters, then, even if calling it Emmerich’s best-ever effort (which happens more than once in the comments) is definitely wide of the mark.
