“I rubbed my hands with glee”: the only time Edgar Wright was desperate for a movie to flop
For the most part, no director would wish ill upon another filmmaker’s movie because it would be incredibly unprofessional for them to admit they were rooting for it to fail. However, Edgar Wright had his reasons, and he was thrilled when his wish was granted.
He’s no stranger to a flop himself, unfortunately, with Wright’s recent redux of The Running Man falling well short of expectations. Despite boasting an accomplished auteur at the helm and the double whammy of Stephen King and Glen Powell to sell it to the masses, the dystopian actioner was a bust.
It wasn’t the first time one of his pictures had sank without a trace at the box office, either, and it may not be a coincidence that the only two times it’s happened came when he was working for a major Hollywood studio with a blockbuster-sized budget, with the rest of his filmography typically turning a decent profit.
After Shaun of the Dead put him on the map, opened the doors to America, and ingratiated him with the likes of Quentin Tarantino, George A Romero, and Peter Jackson, Wright followed it up with Hot Fuzz, solidifying himself as one of the United Kingdom’s most exciting and fastest-rising talents.
Unfortunately, his first American production, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, didn’t come close to recouping its budget in cinemas, despite enthusiastic reviews. The silver lining is that the comic book adaptation has since become an enduring cult favourite that continues growing more popular over time, which can’t be said about the failed comedy Wright was thrilled to see crash and burn on the big screen.
“I remember getting an email from Marc Platt, one of the film’s producers, on the Friday, asking Universal to put more into the spend and predicting doom for the weekend,” he recalled to Entertainment Weekly. “And I thought, naively, I thought, ‘Well, it’s only Friday morning, how could they know?’ They know. It opened at number five.”
In its second weekend, Scott Pilgrim vs the World plummeted to tenth position, and then it was basically done as a theatre-going concern. When one comedy mogul made a point of kicking the film when it was down, Wright didn’t forget, and after waiting for almost four long years, he was able to celebrate his revenge.
“I’ve never liked Seth MacFarlane, because that weekend he tweeted, ‘Scott Pilgrim 0, the World 2,'” the filmmaker explained. “I was like, fuck you. And then I lay in wait until 8 Million Ways to Die in the West came out, or whatever it was called, and I rubbed my hands with glee. I didn’t tweet anything, because I’m not a total monster!”
Scott Pilgrim vs the World debuted in August 2010, and since he couldn’t mock MacFarlane’s Ted two years later when it earned over half a billion dollars to become the highest-grossing R-rated comedy of all time, he continued biding his time until May 2014. The Family Guy creator’s A Million Ways to Die in the West opened in third and quickly fell off, but at the end of the day, it still out-earned Scott Pilgrim by almost double, so it wasn’t the sweetest revenge, all things considered.
