The true killer, however, was tone. Studio executives worried that “mixing the reverence of Apollo 13 with the levity of a kid’s adventure” would please no one. Test audiences in early 2012 (according to an anonymous script reader’s blog) found the juxtaposition “jarring”—one scene featured a moon buggy chase, the next a silent tribute to fallen cosmonauts. From the Earth to the Moon: Journey 3 was officially shelved in 2013. The Journey franchise went dormant. Tom Hanks’ miniseries remains a high-water mark for factual lunar storytelling.
In the annals of speculative film development, few titles carry as much tantalizing mystery as the project unofficially known as From the Earth to the Moon: Journey 3 . While casual moviegoers remember the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon (produced by Tom Hanks) and the 2008-2015 Journey franchise ( Journey to the Center of the Earth and Journey 2: The Mysterious Island ), a curious hybrid of these two properties was once quietly floated in Hollywood’s development trenches. from the earth to the moon movie journey 3
This is the story of the film that never launched—a script that dared to fuse Jules Verne’s 1865 ballistic-astronomy classic with the modern family-adventure blockbuster format. Sometime in late 2010, following the modest success of Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (which grossed $335 million worldwide), New Line Cinema entertained a radical pitch: a third Journey film that would abandon subterranean caves and cryptozoological isles for the ultimate frontier—the Moon. The true killer, however, was tone
By J. Alexander Rowe | Cinema History