Trailer
Plot summary
Norma Lewis teaches literature at a private school in Virginia, and her husband, Arthur, works in optics at NASA, where he helped build the camera that flew on the Viking Mars probe. On a December morning in 1976, they find a wooden box on the doorstep of their home, holding a button unit and a note saying a visitor will come that evening. Both receive bad news that day: Arthur is turned down for the astronaut program after failing a psychological exam, and Norma learns the school is ending its tuition discount for their son, Walter. That evening Arlington Steward, his face severely disfigured, makes his offer. One press of the button brings one million dollars, but a person they have never met will die. They have twenty-four hours to decide.
Cast
- Kevin Robertsonas Wendell Matheson
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Box (2009)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Audiences polled by CinemaScore on opening day gave The Box an F, for which CinemaScore president Ed Mintz blamed the film's ending, saying: “People really thought this was a stinker.”
- Arcade Fire members Win Butler and Regine Chassagne, along with composer Owen Pallett, wrote the film's score and also advised director Richard Kelly during editing. They planned to release the soundtrack after Arcade Fire's third album in August 2010, but as of 2023 it still had not come out.
- Director Richard Kelly filmed scenes at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, a location with personal meaning since his own father had worked at NASA Langley during the 1970s and 80s.
- The mysterious character Arlington Steward drives a Buick Electra on screen, but characters in the film call it a Lincoln Town Car, a different model that had not even entered production yet in the story's 1976 setting.
- The Box earned a nomination at the 8th Visual Effects Society Awards for Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Feature Motion Picture, but lost to Sherlock Holmes.
