Domestic wrap-up and other thoughts
October 31, 2009
Alright, the domestic theatrical run of the movie is wrapping up, and I have a few thoughts, but let me get the relevant announcements out of the way first:
-Canadian release is locked in for November 13th, and yes, as far as I know it’s still only Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary.
-The UK release is still slated for January 1st, and again, I am hoping to get over there to do press. No additional info.
-The DVD comes out domestically in January, not sure of the exact date yet.
As far as personal travel plans, here are the things I have locked down:
-I’ll be in Austin, Texas to go to the UT/UCF game on November 7th. I was supposed to go to the Tech game when I was in Austin on the movie tour, but was too exhausted, but I got offered tickets to this game, so I’m going back and making up for earlier.
-I’ll be in Toronto on November 10th doing press for the movie.
-I’m going to be in Cancun from November 22nd through November 27th for the Cancun Challenge college basketball tournament. So excited to sit courtside and watch Kentucky torch a bunch of scrub teams.
-I’m going to be in Ireland the first week of February, and you won’t believe why. I am not say why I’m going yet, but it is ridiculous and awesome. I didn’t even believe the offer when I first got it, but once I realized it was legit, I was on it.
-Also planning a big trip to Brazil, and maybe Buenos Aires, later that month.
Now, as to the movie itself:
We are going to wrap up our domestic theatrical run with about 1.5 million in gross receipts. No question, that is way way less than anything I was hoping or predicting that the movie would do. In fact, it’s less than 10% of my bottom-basement prediction for what the movie would do. So this of course raises the question: How the fuck was I so far off in my predictions?
The movie has been out a month and we have all had a chance to soberly reflect on what happened and why I wasn’t just a little bit off, I was off by several orders of magnitude. To be that far off, there has to be some sort of major thing that went wrong, something so crucial that it’s nothing can make up for its absence.
It’s actually pretty clear what happened, and I was sitting in a bar with some people cycling through all the things we did right and wrong about two weeks ago, when something happened that crystallized the problem perfectly. This girl recognized me in the bar and came running up:
Girl: Oh my god you are Tucker Max! This is SO exciting! I am your biggest fan, your book is so awesome!
Tucker: Thank you, glad you liked it.
Girl: I mean, I have read it like 100 times and recommended it to all my friends, and now it’s like our bible! I can’t believe you are here! Can I get a picture?
Tucker: [getting awkward] Of course.
Friend: So, what’d you think about the movie?
Girl: Movie? What movie? There’s a movie of the book?
Tucker: Are you kidding?
Girl: When is it coming out? I am SO excited for it! I bet it’ll be great! Who is playing you?
My heart sank. I wanted to get pissed and snap at this girl, but she hadn’t done anything wrong. I mean, when someone who identifies themselves as a huge fan, who has read the book and passed it to their friends and self-identifies as this type of person, when the movie is IN THEATERS and they don’t even know there is a movie at all…that is a complete failure in the publicity and marketing of the movie.
It’s not like that was the first indication of the massive breakdown in marketing and publicity for the movie. The evidence for this is everywhere. I mean shit, we only spent a few million dollars distributing the movie, were never in more than like 250 theaters, and never even cracked the 50% awareness barrier…AMONG MY OWN FANS! I don’t want to go through it, because it’ll just be depressing, but the failures in marketing were just…big. Unrecoverable.
If I had been either experienced enough or honest enough to look at and understand the evidence in front of me, it was obvious from an early point that this was going to happen. I could go on and on about the issues we had, and and now in hindsight, so many of them are so transparently clear and obvious it is annoying that we didn’t see them at the time. Part of it was a lack of experience, part was naive optimism, and part was straight up malfeasance by certain parties involved with the movie. There will come a time when Nils and I will clearly outline and describe what happened and why, but honestly, I don’t feel like doing it now, both for personal and political reasons. The fact is, the movie did poorly at the box office because we as a group failed at one of the most, if not he most, important aspect of making a successful movie: Marketing that movie.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that losing this battle does not mean the war is over or lost. Many many great movies that got no attention at the box office became classics by doing great on DVD, and there is no doubt in my mind that is what is going to happen with this movie. I’ve seen every reaction, read every email, seen every review, and talked to more people about this movie than anyone else. No one has been more on the ground and seen more actual audience reaction than me. I know what real people who have actually seen the movie think about it, and it’s going to do great, given enough time. The same thing happened with the book. I mean, my book only sold 70k copies it’s first year out, and those only to people who were already fans of the website. Three years and 1+ million copies sold later, I am now a huge literary star. Movie studios may be evil and stupid, but the motherfuckers can do something I can’t do yet: Promote and market the fuck out of a movie.
But it’s OK. The fact still remains that we made a great movie, a movie that I am very proud of, and a movie that the vast majority of people who saw, loved. And I believe that it will stand the test of time and end up becoming a classic and sell for years, just like the book has. Doing poorly at the box office sucks right now, but in ten years when “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell” is one of the best selling DVD’s of all time and spawned hugely successful sequels, etc, etc…well, I think everything will end up fine.
