District 9 (2009)
- During the filming of District 9, the director famously rewrote the ending on the fly after seeing the chemistry between the lead actors.
- Despite a rocky opening weekend, District 9 went on to gross over 5x its budget thanks purely to incredible audience word-of-mouth.
District 9 is a 2009 South African-American science fiction action film directed by Neill Blomkamp, produced by Peter Jackson. Presented partially in documentary style, the film is set in Johannesburg, South Africa, where a massive alien spacecraft arrived 20 years earlier and its malnourished, disorganized inhabitants β derogatorily called "prawns" β were confined to a squalid internment camp called District 9. When bureaucrat Wikus van de Merwe, played by Sharlto Copley, is assigned to oversee the aliens' forced relocation to a new camp, he is accidentally exposed to a mysterious alien fluid that begins transforming him into one of the aliens, making him the most valuable specimen on Earth to both the government and a Nigerian crime lord operating within District 9.
Neill Blomkamp, a South African filmmaker, drew explicitly from his country's apartheid history, and the parallels between the fictional alien segregation and real-world racial oppression were deliberate and unmistakable β District 9 was named after District Six, a real Cape Town neighborhood whose residents were forcibly relocated during apartheid. Sharlto Copley's performance transitioned brilliantly from an oblivious, somewhat pathetic bureaucrat to a desperate, sympathetic figure fighting for his survival and humanity. The film was made for approximately $30 million and earned $210 million worldwide, received four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, and launched Blomkamp as one of science fiction's most exciting new voices.
