AHC: Make Mars Attacks! more successful than Independence Day

Since the alien invasion movies Independence Day and Mars Attacks! were both released in 1996, your challenge, with a PoD no later than 1991, is to make Mars Attacks! the more successful movie of the alien invasion movies.
 
It just wasn't good parody. It's actually hard to have everyone in a film play idiots and come off well, there was no 'Heart' to the film. Mean spirited across the board, and who wants to watch that for an hour and a half?

He had a great cast, and wasted near all of that talent.

It was an early misfire from Burton, but sadly not his last.
He can do great visuals, Stories with him are problematic. Plot is more than just a string to link skits together.

So for starters, a different screenwriter other than Gems. Comedy is hard, and parody even more so. Compare to _Starship Troopers_ can be watched straight or as a parody, there's enough there for both
 
It just wasn't good parody. It's actually hard to have everyone in a film play idiots and come off well, there was no 'Heart' to the film. Mean spirited across the board, and who wants to watch that for an hour and a half?

He had a great cast, and wasted near all of that talent.

It was an early misfire from Burton, but sadly not his last.
He can do great visuals, Stories with him are problematic. Plot is more than just a string to link skits together.

So for starters, a different screenwriter other than Gems. Comedy is hard, and parody even more so. Compare to _Starship Troopers_ can be watched straight or as a parody, there's enough there for both

Each to their own but I liked it. Not everyone in the film is portrayed as an idiot, the Williams family most prominently; there's quite a bit of heart to their story, at least as much as any of the cheese in Independence Day. Whilst it certainly does have mean spirited moments I think that can be allowed given the dark comic tone, there was certainly nothing so egregious as to be off putting (which there certainly was with the original source material) and some of the moments themselves work quite well, particularly when President Dale finally becomes the President he always imagined himself as being only for him to be immediately reminded it's not that sort of movie.

Whether or not it was a good parody falls into one of the film's larger problems, it wasn't sure whether it was a parody and/or a homage or its own thing with the characters largely just reacting to the CGI cartoonishness in sometimes funny, sometimes a bit bland, ways. I think a bit more self awareness from the main characters of the situation they're in, maybe even to the extent of a Pleasantville-esque realisation that they're in a fifties sci-fi movie, would have helped a lot with maybe a few of the plots being trimmed so that it flows better. That said, it was never going to be more successful than Independence Day, at least not in terms of overall popularity or in financial terms. It could have been more widely considered the better movie (which it is already, in my opinion) and won more awards but Summer blockbusters are always going to have some innate advantages provided they aren't total flops.
 
Whilst it certainly does have mean spirited moments I think that can be allowed given the dark comic tone
You can do Dark Tone.

Experiment #1

have David Cronenberg do a $50M _Mars Attacks_ R Rated. almos no CGI, it's practical effects.

Still based on the old '60s Cards, Alien atrocities on Earth, and Earth tries to fight back

He took this
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To this
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So Mars Attacks would be a top grossing film Horror film for 1996

So That film does better.
Easy to make ID worse, just make it more like the sequel
 
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