Interstellar (film)

Interstellar (film)
Interstellar is a 2014 epic science fiction film co-written, directed, and produced by Christopher Nolan. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Matt Damon, and Michael Caine. Set in a dystopian future where humanity is embroiled in a catastrophic blight and famine, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole near Saturn in search of a new home for humankind.
Brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan wrote the screenplay, which had its origins in a script Jonathan developed in 2007 and was originally set to be directed by Steven Spielberg. Kip Thorne, a Caltech theoretical physicist and 2017 Nobel laureate in Physics, was an executive producer, acted as a scientific consultant, and wrote a tie-in book, The Science of Interstellar. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot it on 35 mm movie film in the Panavision anamorphic format and IMAX 70 mm. Principal photography began in late 2013 and took place in Alberta, Iceland, and Los Angeles. Interstellar uses extensive practical and miniature effects, and the company Double Negative created additional digital effects.
Interstellar premiered in Los Angeles on October 26, 2014. In the United States, it was first released on film stock, expanding to venues using digital projectors. The film received generally positive reviews from critics and grossed over $677 million worldwide ($715 million after subsequent re-releases), making it the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2014. It has been praised by astronomers for its scientific accuracy and portrayal of theoretical astrophysics. Interstellar was nominated for five awards at the 87th Academy Awards, winning Best Visual Effects, and received numerous other accolades.
Plot
In 2067, humanity is facing extinction following a global famine caused by ecocide. As a result, ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is forced to work as a farmer, with his son Tom, daughter Murph and father-in-law Donald.
After odd occurrences in her room, Murph arrives at the conclusion that a ghost, trapped in her bookshelf, is trying to communicate the word 'stay' to her. Cooper seeks a scientific explanation for the gravitational anomaly, and deduces a pattern that resolves into GPS coordinates. Following the address, he and Murph arrive at a secret NASA facility, headed by Professor Brand. NASA is distrusting of Cooper initially, but Brand enlists Cooper's help for their mission, believing him to have been led there by the same entity - a supernatural, extra-terrestrial "them" - who decades ago placed a mysterious wormhole, close to humanity's reach near the planet Saturn. NASA's objective is to follow up on earlier missions through the wormhole, and find an exoplanet suited to support human life. Their "Plan A" is to eventually transport people off the dying Earth to the other planet (using a yet-to-be-solved gravity equation), failing which, "Plan B" would use embryos to start a new extra-terrestrial colony, letting Earth's original population perish.
Believing Plan A will save Murph's generation, Cooper bids farewell to his family and embarks on the mission aboard the spacecraft Endurance, along with a crew of three scientists: Romilly, Doyle, and Brand’s daughter Amelia, and two robot assistants TARS and CASE. After reaching their destination, the crew investigate three planets orbiting a supermassive black hole, Gargantua, each previously checked by a NASA scientist-explorer. Romilly remains in orbit to study Gargantua while the others take a Ranger craft to the first planet, an ocean world of shallow water assigned to explorer Laura Miller. Upon arriving at Miller's beacon and finding debris, they realize she was killed by colossal tidal waves generated by Gargantua's gravity. Doyle is swept away by a huge wave, and Cooper and Amelia narrowly escape the next. They return to the Endurance after only a couple of hours in their perspective, yet 23 years have passed aboard Endurance due to the time dilation caused by Gargantua's gravity. Back on Earth, Murph has become a scientist and begun working with the elder Brand.
The second planet's mission fails as well, as the crew realize that the planet's explorer, Mann, whom they awaken from cryostasis, had been transmitting false signals about the ice world's habitability so that someone would rescue him. Mann turns on the crew, first attempting to kill Cooper, then hijacking a Ranger so that he can dock with the Endurance and take control. Romilly is killed by an explosion planted by Mann at the base, and Mann is himself killed after failing to properly dock in space. Cooper and Amelia approach the damaged Endurance in a Lander, and regain control of the spacecraft. On Earth, a dying Brand confesses to Murph that he lied about the viability of Plan A, dooming Earth's population knowingly. He believed that his gravity equation
was unsolvable, as it lacked vital information able to be obtained only from inside a blackhole's singularity. Murph is distraught that her father left her to die, but resolves to finding a solution to Brand's work.
Meanwhile, Cooper devises a plan to initiate a slingshot maneuver around Gargantua, propelling the Endurance onwards to the third and final planet, assigned to Dr. Wolf Edmunds. To shed extra weight, he sacrifices himself and TARS by detaching from the spacecraft and falling into the blackhole, setting up Amelia to safely reach Edmunds' planet. Falling past the event horizon, Cooper finds himself inside a five-dimensional tesseract where time is physically presented. Seeing past moments from Murph's childhood bedroom, he tries to contact her by manipulating items in the room with gravity. Cooper deduces this construct has been created by future humans able to interact with five dimensions - "them" - in order for him to send messages he received in the past, such as the word 'stay'. With TARS's help, Cooper relays the information Murph needs to solve the gravity equation in the form of Morse code on her watch. The tesseract closes, and he and TARS are returned to the orbit of Saturn. Cooper is rescued and brought to an O'Neill Cylinder, where he tearfully reunites with an elderly Murph, who has used the gravity equation to accomplish Plan A and enable humanity's exodus from Earth. Nearing death, she advises him to seek out Amelia. Cooper and TARS set off again to reunite with Amelia. On Edmunds' planet, Amelia buries the deceased Edmunds before removing her helmet to breathe.
Cast
Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a widowed NASA pilot who, after the agency was closed by the government, became a farmer
Anne Hathaway as Dr. Amelia Brand, a NASA scientist, astronaut, and Professor John's daughter
Jessica Chastain as Murphy "Murph" Cooper, Joseph's daughter, who eventually becomes a NASA scientist
Mackenzie Foy as young Murph
Ellen Burstyn as elderly Murph
Bill Irwin as TARS (voice and puppetry) and CASE (puppetry)
Michael Caine as Professor John Brand, a high-ranking NASA scientist, ideator of Plan A, former mentor of Cooper, and father of Amelia
John Lithgow as Donald, Cooper's elderly father-in-law
David Gyasi as Professor Romilly, a high-ranking NASA member, and Endurance crew member
Wes Bentley as Doyle, another high-ranking NASA member, and Endurance crew member
Casey Affleck as Tom Cooper, Joseph's son, who eventually grows up to become a farmer
Timothée Chalamet as young Tom
Matt Damon as Dr. Mann, a NASA astronaut sent to an icy planet during the Lazarus program
Josh Stewart as CASE (voice)
Topher Grace as Getty, Murph's colleague and love interest
Leah Cairns as Lois, Tom's wife
David Oyelowo as School Principal
Collette Wolfe as Ms. Hanley
William Devane as Williams, another NASA member
Elyes Gabel as Administrator
Jeff Hephner as Doctor
Production
Crew
Christopher Nolan – Director, producer, writer
Jonathan Nolan – Writer
Emma Thomas – Producer
Lynda Obst – Producer
Hoyte van Hoytema – Cinematographer
Nathan Crowley – Production designer
Mary Zophres – Costume designer
Lee Smith – Editor
Hans Zimmer – Music composer
Paul Franklin – Visual effects supervisor
Kip Thorne – Consultant, executive producer
Development and financing
The premise for Interstellar was conceived by the producer Lynda Obst and the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, who collaborated on the film Contact (1997), and had known each other since Carl Sagan set them up on a blind date. The two conceived a scenario, based on Thorne's work, about "the most exotic events in the universe suddenly becoming accessible to humans", and attracted Steven Spielberg's interest in directing. The film began development in June 2006, when Spielberg and Paramount Pictures announced plans for a science-fiction film based on an eight-page treatment written by Obst and Thorne. Obst was attached to produce. By March 2007, Jonathan Nolan was hired to write a screenplay.
After Spielberg moved his production studio, DreamWorks, from Paramount to Walt Disney Studios in 2009, Paramount needed a new director for Interstellar. Jonathan Nolan recommended his brother Christopher, who joined the project in 2012. Christopher Nolan met with Thorne, then attached as executive producer, to discuss the use of spacetime in the story. In January 2013, Paramount and Warner Bros. announced that Christopher Nolan was in negotiations to direct Interstellar. Nolan said he wanted to encourage the goal of human spaceflight, and intended to merge his brother's screenplay with his own. By the following March, Nolan was confirmed to direct Interstellar, which would be produced under his label Syncopy and Lynda Obst Productions. The Hollywood Reporter said Nolan would earn a salary of against 20% of the total gross. To research for the film, Nolan visited NASA and the private space program at SpaceX.
Warner Bros. sought a stake in Nolan's production of Interstellar from Paramount, despite their traditional rivalry, and agreed to give Paramount its rights to co-finance the next film in the Friday the 13th horror franchise, with a stake in a future film based on the television series South Park. Warner Bros. also agreed to let Paramount co-finance an indeterminate "A-list" property. In August 2013, Legendary Pictures finalized an agreement with Warner Bros. to finance approximately 25% of the film's production. Although it failed to renew its eight-year production partnership with Warner Bros., Legendary reportedly agreed to forgo financing Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) in exchange for the stake in Interstellar.
Writing and casting
Jonathan Nolan worked on the script for four years. To learn the scientific aspects, he studied relativity at the California Institute of Technology. He was pessimistic about the Space Shuttle program ending and how NASA lacked financing for a human mission to Mars, drawing inspiration from science-fiction films with apocalyptic themes, such as WALL-E (2008) and Avatar (2009). Jeff Jensen of Entertainment Weekly said: "He set the story in a dystopian future ravaged by blight, but populated with hardy folk who refuse to bow to despair." His brother Christopher had worked on other science fiction scripts, but decided to take the Interstellar script and choose among the vast array of ideas presented by Jonathan and Thorne. He picked what he felt, as director, he could get "across to the audience and hopefully not lose them," before he merged it with a script he had worked on for years on his own. Christopher kept in place Jonathan's conception of the first hour, which is set on a resource depleted Earth in the near future. The setting was inspired by the Dust Bowl that took place in the United States during the Great Depression in the 1930s. He revised the rest of the script, where a team travels into space, instead. After watching the 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl for inspiration, Christopher contacted the director, Ken Burns, and the producer, Dayton Duncan. They granted him permission to use some of their featured interviews in Interstellar.
Christopher Nolan wanted an actor who could bring to life his vision of the main character as an everyman with whom "the audience could experience the story." He became interested in casting Matthew McConaughey after watching him in an early cut of the 2012 film Mud, which he had seen as a friend of one of its producers, Aaron Ryder. Nolan went to visit McConaughey while he was filming for the TV series True Detective. Anne Hathaway was invited to Nolan's home, where she read the script for Interstellar. In early 2013, both actors were cast in the starring roles. Jessica Chastain was contacted while she was working on Miss Julie (2014) in Northern Ireland, and a script was delivered to her. Originally, Irrfan Khan was offered the role of Dr. Mann but rejected it due to scheduling conflicts. Matt Damon was cast as Mann in late August 2013 and completed filming his scenes in Iceland.
Principal photography
Nolan shot Interstellar on 35 mm film in the Panavision anamorphic format and IMAX 70 mm photography. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema was hired for Interstellar, as Wally Pfister, Nolan's cinematographer on all of his previous films, was making his directorial debut working on Transcendence (2014); Pfister would later retire as a cinematographer for films.
More IMAX cameras were used for Interstellar than for any of Nolan's previous films. To minimize the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI), Nolan had practical locations built, such as the interior of a space shuttle. Van Hoytema retooled an IMAX camera to be hand-held for shooting interior scenes. Some of the film's sequences were shot with an IMAX camera installed in the nose cone of a Learjet.
Nolan, who is known for keeping details of his productions secret, strove to ensure secrecy for Interstellar. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Ben Fritz stated, "The famously secretive filmmaker has gone to extreme lengths to guard the script to ... Interstellar, just as he did with the blockbuster Dark Knight trilogy." As one security measure, Interstellar was filmed under the name Flora's Letter, Flora being one of Nolan's four children with producer Emma Thomas.
The film's principal photography was scheduled to last four months. It began on , 2013, in the province of Alberta, Canada. Towns in Alberta where shooting took place included Nanton, Longview, Lethbridge, Fort Macleod, and Okotoks. In Okotoks, filming took place at the Seaman Stadium and the Olde Town Plaza. For a cornfield scene, production designer Nathan Crowley planted of corn that would be destroyed in an apocalyptic dust storm scene, intended to be similar to storms experienced during the Dust Bowl in 1930s America. Additional scenes involving the dust storm and McConaughey's character were also shot in Fort Macleod, where the giant dust clouds were created on location using large fans to blow cellulose-based synthetic dust through the air. Filming in the province lasted until , 2013, and involved hundreds of extras in addition to members, most of whom were local.
Shooting also took place in Iceland, where Nolan had previously filmed scenes for Batman Begins (2005). It was chosen to represent two extraterrestrial planets: one covered in ice, and the other in water. The crew transported mock spaceships weighing about . They spent two weeks shooting there, during which a crew of about , including , worked on the film. Locations included the Svínafellsjökull glacier and the town of Klaustur. While filming a water scene in Iceland, Hathaway almost suffered hypothermia because her dry suit had not been properly secured.
After the schedule in Iceland was completed, the crew shot in Los Angeles for . Filming locations included the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Suites, the Los Angeles Convention Center, a Sony Pictures soundstage in Culver City, and a private residence in Altadena, California. Principal photography concluded in December 2013. Production had a budget of , less than was allotted by Paramount, Warner Bros., and Legendary Pictures.
Production design
Interstellar features three spacecraft— the Endurance, a ranger, and a lander. The Endurance, the crew's mother ship, is a circular structure consisting of 12 capsules, laid flat to mimic a clock: Four capsules with planetary settling equipment, four with engines, and four with the permanent functions of cockpit, medical labs, and habitation. Production designer Nathan Crowley said the Endurance was based on the International Space Station: "It's a real mish-mash of different kinds of technology. You need analogue stuff, as well as digital stuff, you need backup systems and tangible switches. It's really like a submarine in space. Every inch of space is used, everything has a purpose." The ranger's function is similar to the Space Shuttle's, being able to enter and exit planetary atmospheres. Lastly, the lander transports the capsules with settling equipment to planetary surfaces. Crowley compared it to "a heavy Russian helicopter."
The film features two robots, CASE and TARS, as well as a dismantled third robot, KIPP. Nolan wanted to avoid making the robots anthropomorphic and chose a quadrilateral design. He said: "It has a very complicated design philosophy. It's based on mathematics. You've got four main blocks and they can be joined in three ways. So, you have three combinations you follow. But then within that, it subdivides into a further three joints. And all the places we see lines—those can subdivide further. So you can unfold a finger, essentially, but it's all proportional." Bill Irwin voiced and physically controlled both robots, with his image digitally removed, and Josh Stewart replaced his voicing for CASE. The human space habitats resemble O'Neill cylinders, a theoretical space habitat model proposed by physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in 1976.
Sound design
Gregg Landaker and Gary Rizzo were the film's audio engineers tasked with audio mixing, while sound editor Richard King supervised the process. Christopher Nolan sought to mix the sound to take maximum advantage of theater equipment and paid close attention to designing the sound mix, like focusing on the sound of buttons being pressed with astronaut suit gloves. The studio's website stated that the film was "mixed to maximize the power of the low-end frequencies in the main channels, as well as in the subwoofer channel." Nolan deliberately intended some dialogue to seem drowned out by ambient noise or music, causing some theaters to post notices emphasizing that this effect was intentional and not a fault in their equipment.
Music
Hans Zimmer, who scored Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy and Inception (2010), returned to score Interstellar. Nolan chose not to provide Zimmer with a script or any plot details, but instead gave him a single page that told the story of a father leaving his child for work. It was through this connection that Zimmer created the early stages of the Interstellar soundtrack. Zimmer and Nolan later decided the 1926 four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ of the Temple Church, London, would be the primary instrument for the score. Zimmer conducted 45 scoring sessions for Interstellar, three times more than for Inception. The soundtrack was released on November 18, 2014.
Visual effects
The visual effects company Double Negative, which worked on Inception, was brought back for Interstellar. According to visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin, the number of effects in the film was not much greater than in Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012) or Inception. However, for Interstellar, they created the effects first, allowing digital projectors to display them behind the actors, rather than having the actors perform in front of green screens. The film contained 850 visual-effect shots at a resolution of 5600 × 4000 lines: 150 shots that were created in-camera using digital projectors, and another 700 were created in post-production. Of those, 620 were presented in IMAX, while the rest were anamorphic.
The ranger, Endurance, and lander spacecraft were created using miniature effects by Nathan Crowley in collaboration with effects company New Deal Studios, as opposed to using computer-generated imagery, as Nolan felt they offered the best way to give the ships a tangible presence in space. 3D-printed and hand-sculpted, the scale models earned the nickname "maxatures" by the crew due to their immense size; the 1/15th-scale miniature of the Endurance module spanned over , while a pyrotechnic model of part of the craft was built at 1/5th scale. The Ranger and Lander miniatures spanned and over , respectively, and were large enough for van Hoytema to mount IMAX cameras directly onto the spacecraft, thus mimicking the look of NASA IMAX documentaries. The models were then attached to a six-axis gimbal on a motion control system that allowed an operator to manipulate their movements, which were filmed against background plates of space using VistaVision cameras on a smaller motion control rig. New Deal Studio's miniatures were used in 150 special effects shots.
Influences
Nolan was influenced by what he called "key touchstones" of science fiction cinema, including Metropolis (1927), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Blade Runner (1982), Star Wars (1977), and Alien (1979). Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror (1975) influenced "elemental things in the story to do with wind and dust and water", according to Nolan, who also compared Interstellar to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) as a film about human nature. He sought to emulate films like Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) for being family-friendly but also "as edgy and incisive and challenging as anything else on the blockbuster spectrum". He screened The Right Stuff (1983) for the crew before production, following in its example by capturing reflections on the Interstellar astronauts' visors. For further inspiration, Nolan invited former astronaut Marsha Ivins to the set. Nolan and his crew studied the IMAX NASA documentaries of filmmaker Toni Myers for visual reference of spacefaring missions, and strove to imitate their use of IMAX cameras in the enclosed spaces of spacecraft interiors. Clark Kent's upbringing in Man of Steel (2013) was the inspiration for the farm setting in the Midwest. Apart from the films, Nolan drew inspiration from the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Scientific accuracy
Regarding the concepts of wormholes and black holes, Kip Thorne said he "worked on the equations that would enable tracing of light rays as they traveled through a wormhole or around a black hole—so what you see is based on Einstein's general relativity equations". Early in the process, Thorne laid down two guidelines: "First, that nothing would violate established physical laws. Second, that all the wild speculations ... would spring from science and not from the fertile mind of a screenwriter." Nolan accepted these terms as long as they did not get in the way of making the film. At one point, Thorne spent two weeks arguing Nolan out of having a character traveling faster than light before Nolan finally gave up. According to Thorne, the element which has the highest degree of artistic freedom is the clouds of ice on one of the planets they visit, which are structures that would go beyond the material strength that ice could support.
The astrobiologist David Grinspoon criticized the dire "blight" situation on Earth portrayed in the early scenes, pointing out that even with a voracious blight it would have taken millions of years to reduce the atmosphere's oxygen content. He also notes that gravity should have pulled down the ice clouds. Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, explored the science behind the ending of Interstellar, concluding that it is theoretically possible to interact with the past, and that "we don't really know what's in a black hole, so take it and run with it". The theoretical physicist Michio Kaku praised the film for its scientific accuracy and said Interstellar "could set the gold standard for science fiction movies for years to come". Timothy Reyes, a former NASA software engineer, said "Thorne's and Nolan's accounting of black holes and wormholes and the use of gravity is excellent".
Wormholes and black holes
To create the visual effects for the wormhole and a rotating, supermassive black hole (possessing an ergosphere, as opposed to a non-rotating black hole), Thorne collaborated with Franklin and a team of 30 people at Double Negative, providing pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the engineers, who then wrote new CGI rendering software based on these equations to create accurate simulations of the gravitational lensing caused by these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, totaling 800 terabytes of data. Thorne described the accretion disk of the black hole as "anemic and at low temperature—about the temperature of the surface of the sun," allowing it to emit appreciable light, but not enough gamma radiation and X-rays to threaten nearby astronauts and planets. The resulting visual effects provided Thorne with new insight into the gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, resulting in the publication of three scientific papers.
Nolan was initially concerned that a scientifically accurate depiction of a black hole would not be visually comprehensible to an audience, and would require the effects team to unrealistically alter its appearance. The visual representation of the black hole in the film does not account for the Doppler effect which, when added by the visual effects team, resulted in an asymmetrically lit black and blue-black hole, the purpose of which Nolan thought the audience would not understand. As a result, it was omitted in the finished product. Nolan found the finished effect to be understandable, as long as he maintained consistent camera perspectives.
As a reference, the asymmetric brightness of the accretion disk is very well visible in the first image of the event horizon of a black hole obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope team in 2019. Futura-Sciences praised the correct depiction of the Penrose process.
According to Space.com, the portrayal of what a wormhole would look like is scientifically correct. Rather than a two-dimensional hole in space, it is depicted as a sphere, showing a distorted view of the target galaxy.
Marketing
The teaser trailer for Interstellar debuted , 2013, and featured clips related to space exploration, accompanied by a voiceover by Matthew McConaughey's character, Cooper. The theatrical trailer debuted , 2014, at the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater in Washington, D.C., and was made available online later that month. For the week ending on , it was the most-viewed film trailer, with over views on YouTube.
Christopher Nolan and McConaughey made their first appearances at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2014 to promote Interstellar. That same month, Paramount Pictures launched an interactive website, on which users uncovered a star chart related to the Apollo 11 Moon landing.
In October 2014, Paramount partnered with Google to promote Interstellar across multiple platforms. The film's website was relaunched as a digital hub hosted on a Google domain, which collected feedback from film audiences, and linked to a mobile app. It featured a game in which players could build Solar System models and use a flight simulator for space travel. The Paramount–Google partnership also included a virtual time capsule compiled with user-generated content, made available in 2015. The initiative Google for Education used the film as a basis for promoting math and science lesson plans in schools.
Paramount provided a virtual reality walkthrough of the Endurance spacecraft using Oculus Rift technology. It hosted the walkthrough sequentially in New York City, Houston, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., from through , 2014. The publisher Running Press released Interstellar: Beyond Time and Space, a book by Mark Cotta Vaz about the making of the film, on . W. W. Norton & Company released The Science of Interstellar, a book by Thorne; Titan Books released the official novelization, written by Greg Keyes; and Wired magazine released a tie-in online comic, Absolute Zero, written by Christopher Nolan and drawn by Sean Gordon Murphy. The comic is a prequel to the film, with Mann as the protagonist.
Release
Theatrical
Before Interstellars public release, Paramount CEO Brad Grey hosted a private screening on , 2014, at an IMAX theater in Lincoln Square, Manhattan. Paramount then showed Interstellar to some of the industry's filmmakers and actors in a first-look screening at the California Science Center on . On the following day, the film was screened at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, California for over of the Screen Actors Guild. The film premiered on at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, and in Europe on at the Odeon Leicester Square in London. The film premiered on November 7 in Canada.
Interstellar was released early on November 4 in various IMAX film, 70 mm film and film theaters, and had a limited release in North America on , with a wide release on . The film was released in Belgium, France, and Switzerland on , the UK on and in additional territories in the following days. For the limited North American release, Interstellar was projected from 70 mm and 35 mm film in that still supported those formats, including at least theaters. A IMAX projector was installed at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles to display the format. The film's wide release expanded to theaters that showed it digitally. Paramount Pictures distributed the film in North America, and Warner Bros. distributed it in the remaining territories. The film was released in over 770 IMAX screens worldwide, which was the largest global release in IMAX cinemas, until surpassed by Universal Pictures' Furious 7 (2015) with 810 IMAX theaters.
Interstellar was an exception to Paramount Pictures' goal to stop releasing films on film stock and to distribute them only in digital format. According to Pamela McClintock of The Hollywood Reporter, the initiative to project Interstellar on film stock would help preserve an endangered format, which was supported by Christopher Nolan, J. J. Abrams, Quentin Tarantino, Judd Apatow, Paul Thomas Anderson, and other filmmakers. McClintock reported that theatre owners saw this as "backward," as nearly all theatres in the US had been converted to digital projection.
Home media
Interstellar was released on home video on March 31, 2015, in both the United Kingdom and United States. It topped the home video sales chart for a total of two weeks. It was reported that Interstellar was the most pirated film of 2015, with an estimated 46.7 million downloads on BitTorrent. It was released in the Ultra HD Blu-ray format on December 19, 2017.
Reception
Box office
Interstellar grossed $188 million in the US and Canada, and $490 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $678 million on original release, against a production budget of $165 million. Deadline Hollywood calculated net profit to be $47 million, accounting for production budgets, marketing, talent participations, and other costs, with box office grosses, and ancillary revenues from home media, placing it 20th on their list of 2014's "Most Valuable Blockbusters". It sold an estimated 22 million tickets domestically.
The film set an IMAX opening record worldwide with $20.5 million from 574 IMAX theaters, surpassing the $17 million record held by The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), and is the best opening for an IMAX 2D, non-sequel, and November IMAX release. It had a worldwide opening of $133 million, which was the tenth-largest opening of 2014, and became the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2014. Interstellar is the fourth film to gross over $100 million worldwide from IMAX ticket sales. It was released in the UK, Ireland and Malta on November 6, 2014, and debuted at number one earning £5.5 million ($8.6 million) in its opening weekend, which was lower than the openings of The Dark Knight Rises (£14.4 million), Gravity (£6.2 million), and Inception (£5.9 million). The film was released in 35 markets on the same day, including major markets like Germany, Russia, Australia, and Brazil earning $8.7 million in total. Through Sunday, it earned an opening weekend total of $83 million from 11.1 million admissions from over 14,800 screens in 62 markets. It earned $7.3 million from 206 IMAX screens, at an average of 35,400 viewers per theater. It went to number one in South Korea ($14.4 million), Russia ($8.9 million), and France ($5.3 million). Other strong openings occurred in Germany ($4.6 million), India ($4.3 million), Italy ($3.7 million), Australia ($3.7 million), Spain ($2.7 million), Mexico ($3.1 million), and Brazil ($1.9 million). Interstellar was released in China on November 12 and earned $5.4 million on its opening day on Wednesday, which is Nolan's biggest opening in China after surpassing the $4.61 million opening record of The Dark Knight Rises. It went on to earn $41.7 million in its opening weekend, accounting for 55% of the market share. It is Nolan's biggest opening in China, Warner Bros.' biggest 2D opening, and the studio's third-biggest opening of all time, behind 2014's The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies ($49.5 million) and 2013's Pacific Rim ($45 million).
It topped the box office outside North America for two consecutive weekends before being overtaken by The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014) in its third weekend. Just 31 days after its release, the film became the 13th-most-successful film and 3rd-most-successful foreign film in South Korea with 9.1 million admissions trailing only Avatar (13.3 million admissions), and 2013's Frozen (10.3 million admissions). The film closed down its theatrical run in China on December 12, with total revenue of $122.6 million. In total earnings, its largest markets outside North America and China were South Korea ($73.4 million), the UK, Ireland and Malta ($31.3 million), and Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) ($19 million). Interstellar and Big Hero 6 opened the same weekend (2014) in the US and Canada. Both were forecast to earn between and . In North America, the film is the seventh-highest-grossing film to not hit No. 1, with a top rank of No. 2 on its opening weekend. Interstellar had an early limited release in the US and Canada in selected theaters on November 4 at 8:00 pm, coinciding with the 2014 US midterm elections. It topped the box office the following day, earning $1.35 million from 249 theaters (42 of which were IMAX screens); IMAX accounted for 62% of its total gross. Two hundred and forty of those theaters played in 35 mm, 70 mm, and IMAX 70 mm film formats. It earned $3.6 million from late-night shows for a previews total of $4.9 million. The film was widely released on November 7 and topped the box office on its opening day, earning $17 million ahead of Big Hero 6 ($15.8 million). On its opening weekend, the film earned $47.5 million from 3,561 theaters, debuting in second place after a neck-and-neck competition with Disney's Big Hero 6 ($56.2 million). IMAX comprised $13.2 million (28%) of its opening weekend gross, while other premium large-format screens comprised $5.3 million (10.5%) of the gross. In its second weekend, the film fell to No. 3 behind Big Hero 6 and newcomer Dumb and Dumber To (2014), and dropped 39% earning $29 million for a two-weekend total of $98 million. It earned $7.4 million from IMAX theaters from 368 screens in its second weekend. In its third week, the film earned $15 million and remained at No. 3, below newcomer The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and Big Hero 6.
Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 73% of 378 critic reviews are positive, with an average of 7.1/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "Interstellar represents more of the thrilling, thought-provoking, and visually resplendent filmmaking moviegoers have come to expect from writer-director Christopher Nolan, even if its intellectual reach somewhat exceeds its grasp." Metacritic assigned the film a score of 74 out of 100 based on 46 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.
Scott Foundas, chief film critic at Variety, said that Interstellar is "as visually and conceptually audacious as anything Nolan has yet done" and considered the film "more personal" than Nolan's previous films. Claudia Puig of USA Today praised the visual spectacle and powerful themes, while criticizing the "dull" dialogue and "tedious patches inside the space vessel." David Stratton of At the Movies rated the film four-and-a-half stars out of five, commending its ambition, effects, and 70 mm IMAX presentation, though criticizing the sound for "being so loud" as to make some of the dialogue "inaudible". Conversely, co-host Margaret Pomeranz rated the film three out of five, as she felt the human drama got lost among the film's scientific concepts. Henry Barnes of The Guardian scored the film three out of five stars, calling it "a glorious spectacle, but a slight drama, with few characters and too-rare flashes of humour." James Berardinelli called Interstellar "an amazing achievement" and "simultaneously a big-budget science fiction endeavor and a very simple tale of love and sacrifice. It is by turns edgy, breathtaking, hopeful, and heartbreaking." He named it the best film of 2014, and the second-best movie of the decade, deeming it a "real science fiction rather than the crowd-pleasing, watered-down version Hollywood typically offers".
Oliver Gettell of the Los Angeles Times reported that "film critics largely agree that Interstellar is an entertaining, emotional, and thought-provoking sci-fi saga, even if it can also be clunky and sentimental at times." James Dyer of Empire awarded the film a full five stars, describing it as "brainy, barmy, and beautiful to behold ... a mind-bending opera of space and time with a soul wrapped up in all the science." Dave Calhoun of Time Out London also granted the film a maximum score of five stars, stating that it is "a bold, beautiful cosmic adventure story with a touch of the surreal and the dreamlike." Richard Roeper of Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film a full four stars and wrote, "This is one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen—in terms of its visuals, and its overriding message about the powerful forces of the one thing we all know but can't measure in scientific terms. Love."
Describing Nolan as a "merchant of awe," Tim Robey of The Telegraph thought that Interstellar was "agonisingly" close to a masterpiece, highlighting the conceptual boldness and "deep-digging intelligence" of the film. Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "This grandly conceived and executed epic tries to give equal weight to intimate human emotions and speculation about the cosmos, with mixed results, but is never less than engrossing, and sometimes more than that." In his review for the Associated Press, Jake Coyle praised the film for its "big-screen grandeur," while finding some of the dialogue "clunky." He described it further as "an absurd endeavor" and "one of the most sublime movies of the decade." Scott Mendelson of Forbes listed Interstellar as one of the most disappointing films of 2014, stating that the film "has a lack of flow, loss of momentum following the climax, clumsy sound mixing," and "thin characters" despite seeing the film twice in order to "give it a second chance." He wrote that Interstellar "ends up as a stripped-down and somewhat muted variation on any number of 'go into space to save the world' movies." Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars, saying that despite his usual quibbles regarding Nolan's excessive dialogue and its lack of a sense of composition, "[Interstellar] is still an impressive, at times astonishing movie that overwhelmed me to the point where my usual objections to Nolan's work melted away ... At times, the movie's one-stop-shopping storytelling evokes the tough-tender spirit of a John Ford picture ... a movie that would rather try to be eight or nine things than just one."
New York Times columnist David Brooks concludes that Interstellar explores the relationships among "science and faith and science and the humanities" and "illustrates the real symbiosis between these realms." Wai Chee Dimock, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, wrote that Nolan's films are "rotatable at 90, 180, and 360 degrees," and that "although there is considerable magical thinking here, making it almost an anti-sci-fi film, holding out hope that the end of the planet is not the end of everything, it reverses itself, however, when that magic falls short when the poetic license is naked and plain for all to see." Author George R. R. Martin called Interstellar "the most ambitious and challenging science fiction film since Kubrick's 2001." In 2020, Empire magazine ranked it as one of the best films of the 21st century.
Accolades
At the 87th Academy Awards, Interstellar received nominations for Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing, and won Best Visual Effects.
See also
Black holes in fiction
Blanet – planet orbiting a black hole
Causal loop
Interstellar travel
List of American films of 2014
List of British films of 2014
List of films featuring drones
List of films featuring space stations
List of time travel works of fiction
Starship
Wormholes in fiction
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
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