John Carpenter’s Most Infamous Flop Could Have Been Radically Different

Ghosts of Mars, John Carpenter's second-to-last film, was a box-office and critical flop when it hit theaters 25 years ago today. The 2001 movie stars Natasha Henstridge (Species) as Lt. Melanie Ballard, part of a squad of police officers sent to a remote mining outpost on a terraformed, colonized Mars, circa 2176, to pick up a convicted criminal named James “Desolation” Williams (Ice Cube). When they arrive, they find that most of the outpost’s inhabitants have been slaughtered by the spirits of long-extinct native Martians, who can possess human bodies and plan to wipe out the intruders.

A mashup of the director’s favorite genres — the Western, sci-fi, the siege thriller — Ghosts of Mars revisits aspects of Carpenter gems like Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing, and The Fog with mixed results. Henstridge, Ice Cube, and a young Jason Statham are all fun to watch, but the visual effects (on a relatively meager $28 million budget) don’t hold up well, and the film suffers from a distinct lack of energy. It does, however, have unique touches, like the way the story unfolds in a nesting-doll series of flashbacks within flashbacks, and the idea that human society on Mars is matriarchal.

Yet while Ghosts of Mars has received a certain amount of reappraisal from Carpenter’s devoted fans, the most interesting thing about it centers around what it wasn’t. For years, there was speculation that Ghosts of Mars actually originated as Escape from Earth, a third movie starring Carpenter’s anti-hero Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell), which would have sent the protagonist of Escape from New York and Escape from L.A. into space.

Even though the rumors eventually proved false, the idea raises tantalizing questions. Could Russell’s presence as Snake have saved the film? Or would a small budget, sub-par visuals, and the presence of other box office duds set on Mars have doomed it anyway?

Considered one of Carpenter’s signature titles, 1981’s Escape from New York is a highly entertaining dystopian action thriller set on a future Manhattan that’s become a giant, walled-in prison for the world’s worst criminals. When terrorists crash the President’s plane inside, ex-Special Forces member Snake Plissken — now a criminal himself — is sent in to rescue him, with both a pardon and Plissken’s life on the line.

Well-received by critics and audiences, Escape from New York was followed 15 years later by Escape from L.A. This time, Snake and his exploits didn’t fare well; the film only made back around half of its $50 million budget (the first movie cost a measly $6 million), and viewers were split on its campier tone. The subdued response led to tentative plans for a third entry, where Snake would leave behind the world he literally powers down into a new Dark Age with an electromagnetic weapon at the end of Escape from L.A., being scuttled.

“Escape from Earth was kind of Snake Plissken in a space capsule, flying interstellar,” Carpenter told Fandom in 2022. “So there’d be a lot of special effects in it. Which I never care about too much. But that’s what it would look like.”

Following 1998’s Vampires, a grungy combination of modern Western and horror picture, Carpenter turned his attention to another Western-style movie, only this time set on our solar system’s famous red planet. And that’s perhaps where the chatter started that Ghosts of Mars, with its anti-hero lead, futuristic setting, and heavy emphasis on action, was in fact a repurposed version of Escape from Earth, with Desolation Williams subbing for Snake Plissken after the studio decided that Snake and Kurt Russell were no longer bankable.

It was Carpenter’s wife and longtime producer, Sandy King, who finally debunked the rumors on Twitter with a simple “No.” But even if that’s the case, we can’t help but wonder if the connection does exist — and if Ghosts of Mars might have done better had it in fact been a Snake Plissken adventure.

The truth is, the finished film could be changed into a Plissken story with a few revisions. Pitting the one-eyed ex-soldier against both a dystopian matriarchal society (assuming it sprang up on Mars after Snake shut Earth down at the end of Escape from L.A.) and the vengeful spirits of the Martians might have proven an interesting challenge for Carpenter and Russell’s anti-hero, forcing him to transform from a loner into a leader. And working with his old pal Russell again might have reinvigorated Carpenter, who was so exhausted by the end of filming that he’s only directed one other movie (2009’s The Ward) in the quarter-century since.

Still, the relative lack of interest in Escape from L.A., as well as the failure of two other high-profile Mars projects — Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars and Antony Hoffman’s Red Planet, both released in 2000 — might have consigned Escape from Earth (or whatever it would have been called) to the same box office demise that befell Ghosts of Mars. That’s a fate that even the legendary Snake Plissken himself might not have been able to escape.

Ghosts of Mars is available on Prime Video.