Before Joaquin Phoenix became the Joker, he was just a child actor playing a Star Wars-loving 12 year old in the 1986 movie SpaceCamp, which was released by 20th Century Fox. However, unlike Joker, SpaceCamp was not major blockbuster success, and wasn’t exactly well-received critically. Being released in 1986, it was also a devastating coincidence that SpaceCamp came out the same year as the Challenger disaster, which probably led to public’s distaste for any space-related movies. Even Roger Ebert pointed out that the then-recent Challenger explosion made the movie hard to watch.
However, SpaceCamp did manage to find some fans and even inspire them to enter pursue aeronautics as a career. One of the movie’s stars, Lea Thompson, has mentioned that because of SpaceCamp, “…I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and say that they became physicists or inventors, how much they loved that movie and how much it inspired them. That was really sweet and something I never really expected.”
Now, according to the Hollywood Reporter, Disney is planning on remaking SpaceCamp for their new streaming platform. Saturday Night Live writers Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell will write the script while John Rickard will serve as the movie’s producer. A release date for the remake has not been announced yet, but it will be released exclusively on the Disney+ streaming service.
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