Twin Movies happen more often than coincidence can explain.
Sometimes it’s studio espionage, scripts getting pitched around until someone decides to loosely interpret the core idea without technically stealing it. Sometimes it’s a cultural fad everyone wants to cash in on before the window closes, like when breakdancing briefly convinced multiple studios they needed to get a feature into theaters before kids moved on to the next thing.
And sometimes it’s a calendar event that everyone can see coming from years away, giving development executives the same bright idea at roughly the same time.
The underwater alien cluster of 1989 is a textbook example of the last kind. James Cameron announced The Abyss and suddenly everyone had a deep sea thriller in production. DeepStar Six is still my favourite. The Lambada Golan-Globus wars of 1990 were pure fad-chasing, two studios literally releasing competing films on the same day, each trying to own a dance craze that was already dead by the time either hit screens. This list is endless, and the moment you see one, you see them all: Dante’s Peak vs. Volcano, Deep Impact vs. Armageddon, Antz vs. A Bug’s Life, Tombstone vs. Wyatt Earp, Back To The Future vs. The Heavenly Kid. Big vs. Vice Versa, 18 again, and Dream a little Dream… you get the big picture.
K-9 vs. Turner & Hooch, The Prestige vs. The Illusionist, No Strings Attached vs. Friends with Benefits… OK, i’ll stop now.
But the 1992 Columbus situation was a little different. That instance wasn’t the usual studio espionage or fad-chasing… it was a date on the calendar, a 500 year anniversary that anyone with half an eye on the cultural schedule could see coming.
Multiple productions independently decided America would want to commemorate this moment. What nobody accounted for was that even by 1992, the commemoration itself was contested, and audiences weren’t sure they wanted to care about this particular anniversary at all.
Ridley Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise was positioned as the prestige entry. Scott had just come off Thelma & Louise, he was comfortable with gritty historical scope, and he had heavyweights like Gérard Depardieu and Sigourney Weaver attached. The film would be a serious-minded epic about what happened after landfall, not just the voyage itself. It was backed by French money, shot with European sensibilities, and aimed at the kind of audience that took historical drama seriously. Whether it succeeded is another question, but the ambition was there.
Enter the Salkinds.
Alexander and Ilya Salkind had been mostly absent from Hollywood since the mid-eighties. Their biggest success in the years since the early Superman films was the syndicated Superboy television series, which they were still producing when Columbus went into production. The Three Musketeers had been their calling card in the 70s, Superman: The Movie was their big triumph, and everything after Superman II showed a rapid decline in both quality and returns.
And Santa Claus: The Movie, their 1985 attempt to do for Christmas what they’d done for Superman, became one of the most expensive failures of the decade. Santa crashed hard.
The Salkind method was always the same: identify an iconic figure, throw money at the spectacle and trust the pre-sold IP recognition to do the heavy lifting at the box office. It worked once, brilliantly, with Superman. But Superman had Richard Donner, who knew that the flying would only work if you spend an hour making the audience believe a man could fly. Donner knew the big spectacle was the payoff, not the actual product. The Salkinds never seemed to grasp that distinction.
Without Donner, you get the later Superman sequels, where Clark fights himself in a junkyard and nobody bothers to explain why or how. You get Supergirl manifesting her costume out of thin air because who’s going to question it. You get Santa Claus: The Movie, which cribs Superman’s structure, complete with a Lex Luthor figure, but little of the warmth that would make audiences care in the first place.
The Salkinds saw what worked without understanding why it worked. They reverse-engineered appeal from its tv-friendly surface features, and assumed any built-in sentimentality would follow along.
Which is my overly long-winded way of bringing us to Christopher Columbus: The Discovery.
For their Chris Columbus film, the Salkinds assembled what they thought was their winning formula. Mario Puzo wrote a screenplay, Marlon Brando collected five million dollars for a supporting turn, and the budget climbed past forty million very quickly. John Glen, fresh off five James Bond films (including the two Dalton entries and A View To A Kill), directed with the steady hand of a Pinewood go-to guy.
On paper, they probably thought this was going to be the prestige production.
But the Salkinds were making a film about a spot on the calendar, not so much the historical event itself. It’s the same folly as Santa Claus. Christmas works as a movie hook because Christmas is a living mythology. People have emotional stakes in it, rituals around it, genuine sentiment about what it means. It’s not like Columbus Day is anything more than a federal holiday nobody asked for, or a history lesson everyone learned in second grade. There are no real Columbus Day family traditions. It’s a day off work… and maybe a mattress sale.
The Salkinds looked at the looming “500th anniversary” and saw the same kind of cultural hook as a “Christmas movie.” They assumed Americans would naturally want to celebrate this momentous occasion, a direct precursor to their own origin myth. What they got was a collective shrug. Columbus is a rhyme. A fact. A mnemonic device you learned before you understood what any of it meant geo-politically.
“In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” He sails, he lands, he thinks it’s India, the end.
Christopher Columbus: The Discovery opened in August 1992 to dismal numbers and worse reviews. I believe multiple Razzies were involved. Critics called it dry as an outdated textbook. Nobody wanted to sit through this history lesson.
Ironically, the film did manage slightly better opening weekend numbers than Scott’s version would achieve seven weeks later on actual Columbus Day, proving the Salkinds’ commercial instincts technically worked for getting a few bums on seats, but word of mouth killed it within days. By the time 1492: Conquest of Paradise arrived in October, audiences had already stopped caring.
And here’s my thing about watching The Discovery now, if you’re inclined to seek it out. Big if. It’s not boring in the way forgettable films are boring, it’s fascinating in the way spectacular miscalculations are fascinating. There’s a, how do you say… foreignness, to the whole production, a tone-deafness that extends beyond simple quality issues into something almost anthropological. The Salkinds, working from Europe, kept making films for an American audience they didn’t quite understand. They assumed American mythologies were simpler than they are, that you could just present the iconography and audiences would salute. But American audiences have a finely tuned bullshit detector when it comes to representation of their own myths.
The Discovery treats Columbus more like a matinee idol in a swashbuckler, all sword fights and romance and hero worship.
Even by 1992, Indigenous rights movements were reshaping the conversation about colonialism, so the film was a little, to use a favourite parlance du jour, politically incorrect. And that’s because the Salkinds never understood what they were making in the first place. They thought they had another Christmas on their hands, but all they had was another Columbus Day.
Seven weeks later, 1492: Conquest of Paradise opened to its own droning silence. Scott’s film was longer, more artistic, more ambitious in its attempt to grapple with consequences. Critics still savaged it, though, and audiences still stayed home. Nobody wanted a Columbus movie in 1992. The anniversary was supposed to be this huge anchor, but both films sank under their own weight.
1492 is the Columbus movie most people remember, if they remember either at all. But Christopher Columbus: The Discovery is the more interesting failure, a collection of ideas that never quite see land, produced by men who thought they could rock the Santa María. That’s the real history lesson right there.
The Salkinds would never make another major film. -Pop
Christopher Columbus: The Discovery landed on Home Video this week in 1993, after an August 21, 1992 theatrical fall off the edge of the world.