‘Who wouldn’t want to be Mark Watney?’: The Martian as virtual-reality adventure

Fox Innovation Lab launches set of mildly interactive, first-person adventures culled from film about astronaut stranded on the red planet, in what is a Hollywood litmus test for a product that’s more than a movie but less than a video game

Reading Time:4 minutes

Matt Damon in a scene from The Martian VR Experience, based on Ridley Scott’s film The M artian. Images: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

Published: 6:00am, 9 Jan 2016Updated: 6:00am, 9 Jan 2016

Many people who watched the Ridley Scott film The Martian in cinemas last year were struck by the scope and immediacy of hero Mark Watney’s world.

Some executives at 20th Century Fox, though, had a different idea on how to make the red planet visceral: offer it up in virtual reality.

Now the studio’s digital-minded Fox Innovation Lab has created The Martian VR Experience, a set of episodic first-person adventures culled from the movie and lightly layered with a level of interactivity.

The studio will then make the film available for an as-yet-undetermined price on the Oculus Rift, the first generation of which consumers can begin pre-ordering this week and, when they debut later in the year, Sony PlayStation VR and HTC’s Vive headsets.

Hovering between passive cinematic experience and active video-game adventure, the new Martian film is among the most ambitious VR projects undertaken by a Hollywood studio. With shiny production values, a top-tier director (Maleficent’s Robert Stromberg) and a plan to charge consumers, it is also one of the most fraught.

“We wanted the experience to end with the emotion you have watching the film, or even to surpass it,” says Fox’s Ted Gagliano of The Martian VR Experience.

We wanted the experience to end with the emotion you have watching the film, or even to surpass it,” said Ted Gagliano, Fox’s president of postproduction and a key Lab figure. “We want Mark’s journey to feel like your journey.”

Select Voice

Choose your listening speed

Get through articles 2x faster

1.25x

250 WPM

Slow

Average

Fast

00:0000:00

1.25x