"It's like Star Wars, only on a much less challenging reading level!"
At that point in the 1980s, Travolta had about as much industry clout as Dean Cain's butler, so he spent the next decade clinging to Battlefield Earth like a seat cushion in a transatlantic plane crash. As soon as Pulp Fiction came around and gave him some of his A-list juice back, Travolta thrust the full force of his considerable chin-butt into fierce negotiations for a Battlefield Earth movie. That was in 1995. It still took five more years for the movie to finally come out, because no production company wanted to touch it -- they felt it was too mired in Scientology, a notion they probably got from the countless passages in the novel condemning the field of psychology as a long-dead cult, the fact that the evil aliens are called Psychlos and Catrists, and the fact that John Travolta had been Scientology's most visible and vocal supporter right up until Tom Cruise was lured into pledging himself to the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard by Mimi Rogers' giant boobs. There was also the lingering problem that the story was the stupidest fucking thing ever written, an affliction John Travolta seems to be incapable of diagnosing.
TriStar Pictures
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