The thing is, the studios are generally more concerned with fitting movies into familiar movie genres than they are with being true to whatever source they come from. There have been a lot of sci-fi movies about space battles and saving the Earth and fighting space monsters and traveling in time, but films about science and exploration in outer space are more uncommon, at least in the post-Star Wars era. You've got older stuff like Forbidden Planet and 2001 and Planet of the Apes (before the twist ending) and Solaris and The Black Hole, but more recently there aren't so many -- a few Mars films, Event Horizon kinda, a remake of Solaris, Lost in Space. There's been a minor spate of them in the past couple of years, with Prometheus, Europa Report, and Interstellar, but still, it's not a prominent subgenre in film. So there's more desire from the studio execs to see combat and villains and Earth in danger than there is to see science and exploration and new worlds.
I read once that there's actually an attitude among studio execs that audiences won't respond to a story that doesn't relate to Earth. So movies like Nemesis and Into Darkness have been under pressure to bring the action and peril back to Earth for the final act, even when it was nonessential to the story. It's not that the writers and directors lack the imagination to go elsewhere, it's that the studio heads don't think audiences will respond to that.
I read once that there's actually an attitude among studio execs that audiences won't respond to a story that doesn't relate to Earth. So movies like Nemesis and Into Darkness have been under pressure to bring the action and peril back to Earth for the final act, even when it was nonessential to the story. It's not that the writers and directors lack the imagination to go elsewhere, it's that the studio heads don't think audiences will respond to that.
Excellent post and point. We get too literal at times with things like "exploration".
