Jonathan Frakes' 2004 kid-friendly sci-fi flick Thunderbirds had everything going for it — except, it didn't. Here's how the movie sent its director to movie jail, where he's yet to escape.
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00:00Jonathan Frake's 2004 kid-friendly sci-fi flick Thunderbirds had everything going for it.
00:06It was based on a beloved TV show with a significant cult following.
00:10It had built-in marketing potential, with a bunch of colorful vehicles that could have
00:13easily become the hot new toys of the season. And it boasted a noteworthy cast that included
00:18the likes of Bill Paxton, Anthony Edwards, Ben Kingsley, and a pre-high school musical,
00:24Vanessa Hudgens. The major appeal of the original show was its cast of puppets,
00:28so the film was a bit of an experiment that begged the question,
00:31would a new generation of kids go see a live-action Thunderbirds? As it turns out,
00:36they would not. It earned only $28.3 million at the worldwide box office against a $57 million
00:43budget and was pretty much universally panned by critics. And that's when Frakes knew that
00:48his Hollywood career was pretty much over. Frakes hadn't tried his hand at directing
00:52until his days as William Riker on Star Trek The Next Generation in the early 1990s.
00:57He reportedly pestered the show's executive producer about the possibility of directing
01:01an episode, and after a crash course, he was allowed to take the job. He would go on to
01:06direct a total of eight TNG episodes and then parlay that experience into a prolific TV
01:11directing career that's still going strong.
01:13He knows exactly what he's doing, and at every point he knows what his shot is.
01:17He doesn't waste any time.
01:18And he's such a good director, he really cares about performance.
01:21Frakes also directed a couple of big-screen Star Trek outings,
01:251996's First Contact and 1998's Insurrection. Then in 2002, he helmed the sci-fi action-comedy
01:32flick Clockstoppers, which managed to earn back its modest budgets. That was a test to see if he
01:38could break out of Star Trek, and it seemed like he could. When he was hired for Thunderbirds,
01:42it was initially a dream gig, as he recalled to Vulture in 2019,
01:46The first three movies I had done had made money. Then I had an agent who was pushing me for jobs.
01:51So I met on Thunderbirds and they said, you have to move to London. I talked to my wife,
01:55Jeannie. We had two babies. But she said she would quit her job and move to London with me.
02:00So I took the job and we moved to London. It was an incredible place to live. It was like a dream."
02:06According to Frakes, the studio was so confident that Thunderbirds would be a hit that they moved
02:10its release date to the middle of the summer. But it turned out that that confidence was very
02:15much misplaced. Frakes also believes that Brady Corbett was miscast as teenage protagonist Alan
02:20Tracy. He liked his young star, but it seems that Corbett didn't like being one, and considering
02:26that Corbett would go on to direct weighty dramatic films like Vox Lux and The Brutalist,
02:30he was clearly headed in a different direction. Ultimately, Thunderbirds just wasn't the type
02:35of giant fantasy spectacular that could compete with the likes of Spider-Man 2.
02:39As Frakes put it bluntly,
02:41Thunderbirds put me in movie jail."
02:43The movie's failure forced Frakes to completely rework his personal life.
02:47He'd rented his Los Angeles home while he was living in London and his kids were in London
02:51schools. They ended up having to sell a lot of their possessions and move to Maine, where his
02:55wife opened a store. And movie jail, while not an actual physical location, is still not a fun
03:01place to be. As Frakes recalled of that period,
03:04"'No one will return your calls. On television, you can take a s---- and nobody notices who
03:08directed it. But in movies, that reputation, that mantle is part of the deal. With that comes
03:14the responsibility and privilege of success. Joy goes with that, and therefore failure.
03:19When a movie fails as significantly as Thunderbirds did, my name was taken off the lists."
03:24Frakes hasn't directed a feature film since Thunderbirds. He's stuck mostly to the small
03:28screen. Time will tell if he ever gets out of movie jail, or if he even wants to anymore.
03:33TV, after all, has been very, very good to him.