After Earth
2013 film directed by M. Night Shyamalan
After Earth is a 2013 American post-apocalyptic action-adventure film starring Jaden and Will Smith. The film was loosely based on an original story idea by Will Smith about a father-and-son trip in the wilderness before it was eventually reworked into a sci-fi setting, taking place 1,000 years in the future where humans have evacuated Earth to another planet due to a massive environmental catastrophe.
The film was directed by M. Night Shyamalan, who co-wrote the screenplay with Gary Whitta. Will Smith, his wife Jada Pinkett Smith, his brother-in-law Caleeb Pinkett, and business partner James Lassiter co-produced the film via their company Overbrook Entertainment while Columbia Pictures was the distributor. The film was co-produced by John Rusk, who was also the first assistant director on this film as well as on many of Shyamalan's other films.
The film follows father and son, Cypher and Kitai Raige, who find themselves crash-landing on the abandoned Earth. When Cypher gets injured from the crash, Kitai must travel across the wild environment in search of a backup beacon to fire a distress signal, while having to defend himself from the highly evolved animals, as well as an extraterrestrial creature that detects its prey by smelling fear.
The film was released in IMAX on May 31, 2013. Upon release, After Earth was panned by film critics and made $243.8 million at the box office against a budget of $130 million, becoming a box-office failure.
Plot
In the future on a human-populated space colony, Nova Prime, the S'krell extraterrestrial race attempts to take it over with creatures called Ursas, which hunt by "sensing" fear despite being technically blind.
“After Earth” enters the record as 2013 film directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Earth, film and directed can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1254088. The first chronological checks are 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “After Earth” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.