While the sci-fi genre is one that spans a lot of themes, conventions, and ideas, there is one that is the absolute bread and butter of things: time travel. For as long a sci-fi has existed, man has been fascinated by the idea of moving through time — be it going forward into the future or back into the past — in furtherance of either changing outcomes or exploring settings only found in history books. But even among a plethora of sci-fi stories, there are some that stand above the rest, not only because of how good they are but for how they change our idea of what time travel would really be like if we could actually achieve it. In 2005, one such classic finally got a film adaptation more than fifty years after it was published, but it was so bad it had fans wishing they could go back in time and stop it from ever happening.
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On September 2, 2005, A Sound of Thunder opened in theaters. The film was based on Ray Bradbury’s iconic, genre-changing 1952 short story of the same time and starred Edward Burns, Catherine McCormack, and future MCU favorite Ben Kingsley in a story where time tourism goes horribly awry causing so much of an interference in the past that the present is massively and devastatingly altered. But while the idea of an adaptation of Bradbury’s story looked good on paper and the idea of the consequences of human tinkering with things larger than themselves should have been box office gold, the movie was a massive failure, both in terms of money and in fan and critical response. What should have been a great adaptation was ultimately a poor deviation from an iconic tale fraught with numerous issues — and those issues began well before the cameras started to roll.
A Sound of Thunder Was Mostly Doomed From the Start
While no movie is ever a guaranteed success, things started going off the rails for A Sound of Thunder pretty early on. Initially the film was to be directed by Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger director Renny Harlin with Pierce Brosnan on board to star — and Brosnan was still on a pretty big high due to his turn as James Bond. However, before filming began Brosnan wanted the script to be rewritten and by November of 2001, Brosnan had left the project with Burns taking his place and Harlin was also out, with Peter Hyams now on to direct. Hyams as the director wasn’t necessarily a bad choice. He had helmed Timecop and End of Days so sci-fi wasn’t out of his wheelhouse. But the script was another matter. Writers Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer had written the movie pilot for a tv series that was never picked up (Thoughtcrimes) and the movie Sahara which bombed so badly it is frequently considered one of the biggest box office failures ever. Adding to issues, the production company for the film, Franchise Pictures, went bankrupt during the film’s post production, which caused a budget issue leading to the use of previsualization software.
The deck was clearly stacked against the film, but a good story can overcome a lot. That’s not the case with A Sound of Thunder. The movie version changes almost everything from Bradbury’s iconic story. The elements of time tourism still exists and various character names are the same, but instead of being a straightforward movie about going back in time, making a mistake, and that mistake ruins the future, the movie turned into almost a heist-like tale, with characters going back and forth in time to try to fix things only to make things worse. There was also the invention of “time waves” that didn’t make sense either as a work of fiction or with basic science, and at one point a primary character is turned into a weird human-catfish hybrid that we’re meant to believe is a result of the changes to the timeline. The film’s ending is also dramatically different from the story so what was a chilling cautionary tale on paper ends up coming across as merely a fixable “oopsie” on the screen.
Between the production issues, the bad story, widely panned performances, and effects that are so bad they take you out of the film experience entirely (and don’t get me started on how weird Kingsley’s hair is in this movie, just trust me when I say it’s insane and distracting), what fans who had been eagerly awaiting an adaptation of one of Bradbury’s most important works ended up getting was a mess. If you want to check this mess of a film out for yourself, it’s available to stream on Prime Video with the Howdy subscription add on. If not, well, you can join the rest of us waiting for someone to read the Bradbury classic and decide to give the story another shot.
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