Movie history has seen many excellent sci-fi films made by teams of talented people, but it can be argued that no work in the genre was ever more loaded with talent than 2007’s Sunshine, which nonetheless went on to be a box office flop. The film did reasonably well with critics, as reflected in its 76% Rotten Tomatoes rating, but that wasn’t enough to save it from becoming one of 2007’s bigger financial disappointments.

The special alchemy that goes into making a hit movie is always difficult to conjure. Sometimes, all the elements can seem to be in place, but things still don’t come together. With Sunshine, all the necessary talent was present, both in front of and behind the camera, but the resulting film lacked the secret ingredient needed for it to blow up at the box office.

Sunshine Features A Loaded Cast

There Are Big Names All Over The Place

The tale of a mission to reignite the dying sun using a mᴀssive bomb, Sunshine ᴀssembles an amazing ensemble cast, headlined by a pair of future Oscar winners. Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy plays his first movie physicist, who like his later Oscar-winning character, bears a huge burden of responsibility, with the fate of humanity at stake. Everything Everywhere All At Once Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh joins Murphy in playing a space-faring biologist.

Sunshine’s diverse cast includes a pair of actors, Chris Evans and Benedict Wong, who would go on to be major players in the MCU. The pilot of the movie’s ill-fated spacecraft is played by Rose Byrne, who would go on to score numerous award nominations for her TV work. TV has also been good to the man who plays the Sunshine ship’s captain, Hiroyuki Sanada, who snagged an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his performance in Shogun. Shazam! star Mark Strong is also here as the psycH๏τic captain responsible for sabotaging an earlier sun-igniting mission.

Sunshine Was Written By Alex Garland & Directed By Danny Boyle

It Was Not Their First Teaming

Alex Garland first teamed up with Danny Boyle when Garland’s novel The Beach was adapted by the Trainspotting director. They then proved an excellent pairing on 28 Days Later, Garland’s intelligent script being given dynamic life through Boyle’s kinetic direction. The film was a hit, and its writer-director team decided that science fiction should be the next genre for them to tackle.

Sunshine may have been a flop at the box office, but its script is loaded with meaty philosophical ideas. This is all thanks to Garland, whose reputation for writing and directing thought-provoking sci-fi would later be cemented with his scripts for Never Let Me Go and Dredd, and his acclaimed self-directed films Ex Machina and Annihilation.

Boyle rebounded in a huge way after the disappointment of Sunshine, veering away from genre films with the prestige drama Slumdog Millionaire, a surprise hit that won eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Boyle. Garland’s own Oscar nomination came for his Ex Machina script.

Why Sunshine Ultimately Flopped

It Was Both Too Smart And Too Dumb

Fox Searchlight released Sunshine to a wide audience on July 27, 2007, rolling it out on a relatively small number of screens (451), and seeing it finish at 13th in its opening weekend, with $1.2 million grossed domestically, for a not-impressive $2,740 per-screen average. The film’s final tally reached only $32 million worldwide, short of its $40 million budget.

Sunshine faced some stiff summer blockbuster compeтιтion, its wide release coming the same weekend as The Simpsons Movie, with huge hits like Transformers, Ratatoullie, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix still in theaters. Lacking a major star to open it, Sunshine was never going to make a big splash its first weekend, and would’ve needed great word-of-mouth to pick up steam after that.

Boyle and Garland’s film did garner some good reviews, but critical sentiment about it was not strong enough to boost it at the box office. A big complaint about the movie held that, though it worked well as an intriguing, smart sci-fi film for the first two acts, it fell apart in the third, thanks to a wild tonal shift. Quentin Tarantino was among those who criticized the movie’s final act, which brings in the villainous character Pinbacker out of nowhere, veering suddenly into survival-horror mode:

Garland’s third act monster development goes against every single aspect of that film’s aesthetic that preceded it. In fact, the most ham-handed studio interference couldn’t have damaged the artistic integrity of the film any more than Garland did with his writing.

Having introduced some weighty philosophical ideas in the first two acts, steering Sunshine onto an elevated genre path, Garland seemingly lost faith in his own storytelling, going for a more conventional monster-movie feel to wrap up. True sci-fi nerds who enjoyed the first two acts were bound to be let down by this confounding climax, while moviegoers looking for a fun popcorn film were destined to be so bored by the first two-thirds of the film, they would scarcely care when it suddenly turned into an Alien-style thriller.

There is a lot to admire about Sunshine, visually stunning and thoughtful as much of it is, and it does have its champions to this day. But to be a bigger box office hit, it would have had to either sell out entirely to mainstream considerations, or follow through fully on its loftier aims, wowing critics and sci-fi fans enough to get word-of-mouth going.

Boyle and Garland did have their clashes over Sunshine’s story, with Garland seeking to steer it in a darker direction, while Boyle argued for a more hopeful outlook. The film was always going to face an uphill battle to become a big success, but with a relatively modest budget, it did have a chance to be at least a sleeper hit. It’s impossible to say what would have happened had Boyle and Garland done a better job reconciling their differing visions of the film, crafting a more cohesive narrative around their undeniably great acting ensemble.