Somehow, he was able to rope Orson Welles into making the film. Despite being a visionary director, Mr. Welles had fallen on hard times, taking any work that came his way. It's uncertain if Mr. Welles had only taken the job for the money or if he believed in the project at first, but by the time the film had premiered, he had grown disillusioned with it. Apparently he took exception with the translations and interpretations of Nostradamus' work. After a heavy run on HBO and a modest videocassette release, the project was shelved.
In the early 1990's, the first Iraq War had re-stoked interest in the film. Viewers remembered that the film had interpreted a passage as suggesting that a Middle East dictator would rise up to fight against the west. Video rental stores saw a spike in tape rentals, so the film's distributor Warner Brothers did a limited run of the videocassettes to meet demand. NBC was eager to cash in on the film's newfound success, but there were several predictions that had been made that were wrong or misinterpreted. Rather than just edit those scenes out, the network chose to hire Charlton Heston to host their broadcast of the film. Mr. Heston's narration was pulled nearly verbatim from the film and the re-enactments were lifted from it as well. The re-airing had middling success and neither it nor the original have been released on newer formats.
