Says O’Donnell, “We were kind of shocked by the level of animosity towards the film. I mean, it’s not a perfect film by any means, but…I think we were both expecting it to be more embraced by the horror and monster loving community.
Yeah that didn’t happen. I was on-board back in early-October until I started hearing some buzz that the film was, well, terrible. So how exactly did this take them by surprise? “Everyone internally was so enthusiastic,” explains O’Donnell. “Brett Ratner loved it.” (Should that not have been your first sign that something was definitely wrong?)
Cordes adds, “I always felt like I’m part of the online movie community. And I sincerely made a movie that I wanted to see, and hoped they’d want to see, but apparently that wasn’t the case.” Not only did they not want to see it, the people who did see it seemed to quite vocally hate the film. Of the backlash, O’Donnell adds, “I thought it was so bad it was already legendary!”
I think both O’Donnell and Cordes are a little close to the film and it’s too soon after the release for them to really look at this objectively and understand what went wrong. I think there were a LOT of people really rooting for this film and how it was produced (independently for about $10 million). But marketing wasn’t the problem, the PG-13 rating wasn’t the problem…the movie just wasn’t good. If it was, people would’ve openly supported it, despite box-office (see: SCOTT PILGRIM).
Click here to head to Cinematical and read the entire interview and whether they think there will still be that planned sequel (spoiler alert: they actually do!).