How a 1979 disaster film became a real-life catastrophe for its studio
In short: Meteor was intended to be a blockbuster, but it became a cautionary tale of production chaos. Beset by firing three separate special effects teams, losing its composer, and suffering through a disastrous script rewrite, the film flopped so hard it forced its studio into a desperate buyout negotiation.
The 1979 film Meteor was inspired by a 1967 MIT student project called Project Icarus, which explored theoretical methods for deflecting an asteroid. While the film’s premise—a race against time to stop an extinction-level asteroid using secret Cold War nuclear satellites—sounded like a hit, the production was plagued by instability from the start. Director Ronald Neame and star Sean Connery rejected the initial screenplay, leading to a complete rewrite by Stanley Mann that triggered a Writers Guild of America dispute.
The film's technical failures were even more severe. The production fired its first special effects director, Frank Van de Veer, and subsequently dismissed two more teams. With the release date looming, the final effects crew had to work with a depleted budget, resorting to using 22-inch miniatures and repurposing footage from a 1978 film titled Avalanche. The Hong Kong tsunami sequence was filmed in an improvised water tank using cardboard building cutouts, a choice that critics later mocked for its lack of visual quality.
Upon its release on October 19, 1979, Meteor was widely panned. Critics described the suspense as sludgy and the special effects as substandard, with one reviewer comparing the asteroid to green mold. Despite a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Sound, the film was a financial disaster. Samuel Z. Arkoff, head of American International Pictures, later identified it as the most difficult production in the studio's history. The massive costs associated with the film's production and marketing ultimately forced the studio to negotiate a buyout from Filmways.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Meteor (film)
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