After films like Eat Drink Man Woman, Brokeback Mountain or Life of Pi: Shipwreck with Tiger, you would hardly associate director Ang Lee with a sci-fi actioner like Gemini Man. But he was actually behind the camera for the blockbuster starring Will Smith, which was first in production in 1997 and had to be postponed several times.
On Friday evening, ProSieben will be showing the film with groundbreaking technology. In the end, Gemini Man flopped.
Sci-fi blockbuster Gemini Man relied on spectacular images, but failed at the box office
The plot of the film revolves around US agent Henry Brogan (Smith), who is hunted by his employers after leaving the business. Suddenly his younger clone is chasing him.
Gemini Man was shot in High Frame Rate (HFR) shot at 120 frames per secondresulting in hyper-real, extremely fluid images. However, only a few cinemas worldwide were technically able to show Lee’s film in both HFR format and 3D. The effect was therefore lost on large parts of the audience.
In addition, there was the technically complex process of creating a younger version of Will Smith’s main character. This involved more than just using the de-aging technology known from films like Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. In an interview, Stuart Adcock, the technical director at the time, told us:
The biggest difference is that we did not rejuvenate any faces that were captured on camera. We captured the complete representation generated from scratch by computer.
Watch a German Gemini Man trailer here:
Gemini Man – Trailer 2 (English) HD
However, the $138 million sci-fi actioner failed to make it to the box office in 2019. Worldwide, Gemini Man grossed only 173 million dollars which resulted in a major financial loss for the studio.
When is Gemini Man with Will Smith on TV?
ProSieben will broadcast the sci-fi actioner with Will Smith on May 24, 2024 at 20:15 The film runs with commercial breaks until 10:35 p.m. Gemini Man is currently not available anywhere in a streaming flat rate. You can rent or buy the blockbuster on Amazon Prime, for example.