Cast away wilson ball movie#
Cast away wilson ball Patch#

“It takes about six and a half years to float around the Heyerdahl Gyre,” Ebbesmeyer explains, so if he’s still floating and hasn’t washed ashore, Wilson would currently be on his fourth trip around the gyre. Were he to somehow avoid being absorbed into a garbage patch, Wilson might also still be floating around in the ocean.

Wilson may have even ended up back at the very same island that he and Hanks escaped from. Or he would have washed ashore on a small island somewhere in the gyre, as Ebbesmeyer explains that islands act as magnets for garbage in the ocean, washing ashore from the force of the ocean currents. If Wilson was caught in one of those garbage patches, he’d likely still be there 20 years later in a giant island of trash. W hile we don’t know exactly where Hanks’ island was in Cast Away, we’re told that it was “ 600 miles south of the Cook Islands ,” which are 3,000 miles east of Australia, putting Wilson firmly in the Heyerdahl Gyre. These two patches exist in what is known as the “Heyerdahl Gyre,” the circular pattern of the ocean in the South Pacific.

Cast away wilson ball Patch#

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch was originally given its name by a prominent oceanographer by the name of Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who explains to me that Wilson could have ended up in one of the two big garbage patches that fall between Australia and South America. If it was made of materials heavier than seawater, it would sink quickly,” explains Captain Charles Moore, an oceanographer and boat captain who helped to bring a great deal of attention to The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a giant island of garbage more than twice the size of Texas in the middle of the North Pacific ocean.

“It would float initially and, as more barnacles and other fouling organisms grew, it would begin to sink - that is, if the materials had a specific gravity less than that of seawater. How long, exactly, is difficult to determine, but he would pretty much remain afloat until organisms like algae and barnacles weighed him down, eventually sinking him. Sticks and plastic - which make up the vast majority of Wilson - both float, so after drifting away from Hanks, Wilson would likely have stayed afloat for a very long time. This is never explained in the movie, but the audience is left to assume that somewhere in the four-year gap in the film, Hanks got into one of his many fights with Wilson and somehow tore him open, but later regretted it and stuffed him with sticks, giving him a stranded-on-an-island haircut to match his own. Final stage Wilson also had hair made from twigs coming from inside the volleyball. The outer layer is the aforementioned synthetic leather, which is primarily PVC plastic, then there’s usually a layer of cheesecloth-type cotton adhered with rubber glue, and the innermost layer is a rubber bladder made of polyisobutylene, a synthetic rubber. I also found a website detailing the chemistry of the typical volleyball, which explains the breakdown of volleyballs layer-by-layer. Indeed, the side of the box said the ball was made from “Top Quality Synthetic Leather,” confirming my theory. Eventually I found an auction for a screen-used volleyball from Cast Away still in its packaging (from before Wilson got a face). Most volleyballs are made of synthetic leather, but Cast Away is 20 years old, so I had to be sure. The first thing I had to determine was what, exactly, Wilson was made out of. But what of Wilson? Since director Robert Zemeckis never revealed what became of the movie’s second biggest star, it’s been left to me to explore the possibilities.

Hanks tries to rescue him, but Wilson is too far gone.Īfter screaming “I’m sorry Wilson!!!” as his buddy drifts away, Hanks gets rescued by a passing ship, flies back to America and sets out for a life of new possibilities. But after a storm, Hanks finds his spherical pal adrift, having come dislodged from the post he’d been tied to. After being best buds with Tom Hanks for four years on a small island in the South Pacific, Hanks and his trusty volleyball set sail upon a makeshift raft, determined to be rescued by a passing ship in the ocean.

Cast away wilson ball movie#

The last time we saw Wilson in ultimate social-distancing movie Cast Away, things weren’t going so well for him.