If Luc Besson’s science fiction bonanza The Fifth Element had been made in the 1960s, you can bet it would have starred Sean Connery as Korban Dallas opposite Christopher Lee as Zorg, while Daniela Bianchi (of From Russia With Love fame) would have become Leeloo. Artist Peter Stults has created a bevy of time-bending glimpses into alternate worlds where familiar films are reimagined in other eras.
To be clear, Stults has done a ton of these, and the Connery-centric Fifth Element is only the tip of this bizzaro-world iceberg. Stults has created posters for a Blade Runner where Humphrey Bogart plays Deckard, an Avatar with William Shatner, the Alien series with Pam Grier as Ripley, and an insane version of The Hobbit where David Bowie played the Elf Lord Elrond. Delightfully apocryphal and beautifully rendered, Stults’s entire body of work is crazy extensive, meaning picking a favorite is just as difficult as trying to parse out what living in these alternate worlds would feel like.
In Back to the Future, Marty McFly gives his father George accidental knowledge of both Star Wars and Star Trek when he impersonates a mash-up alien called “Darth Vader from the Planet Vulcan,” which also could have created a weird alternate version of those properties, too. As it stands, we’ll never know what kinds of sci-fi George McFly wrote in the 1960s, but these posters are interesting cousins of that notion.
The possibilities of alternate dimensions in science fiction are a big part of the genre, but now, like Marty creating anachronisms via time travel, Peter Stults’s artwork allows us to dream of alternate dimensions in which science fiction cinema itself is vastly different than what we’ve experienced here in our world.
All of Peter Stults’s artwork can be found here.
