The $0 budget movie that beat Christopher Nolan to number one at the box office: “A very unique situation”
2020 was a weird time for the movie business. When the COVID pandemic swept the world, forcing countries to send their citizens into lockdown for long periods, cinemas were one of the many businesses shut down for months at a time. At certain points, it looked like they’d never open again, and the future of the theatrical movie business was hanging by a thread. Then Christopher Nolan came along.
Nolan was preparing for the July release of Tenet, his $205million backwards secret agent blockbuster, when lockdowns began being enforced worldwide in March. With the future of cinemas so uncertain, it was rumoured that Warner Bros was considering simply releasing the film on HBO Max or as a premium rental, but that idea horrified the notoriously big-screen-loving director. He was hellbent on Tenet being the first Hollywood tentpole movie released when cinemas could finally reopen, thereby saving cinema itself.
Unfortunately for Nolan, though, Warner wasn’t about to release Tenet until enough cinemas were back in operation to justify its release. After all, this movie cost over $200million, and the studio didn’t want to jeopardise its return on investment. So, to Nolan’s chagrin, a trickle of movies was released in late August before Tenet’s planned release on September 3rd. It led to the Russell Crowe road rage schlockfest Unhinged and the ill-fated X-Men spinoff The New Mutants hitting number one at the box office, which never would have happened had there been a fuller release schedule.
However, here’s where the situation gets even stranger. On June 21st, a full month before Crowe’s violent thriller hit the top spot, another movie reached the heady heights of number one. It was called Unsubscribe, was only 29 minutes long, and was filmed entirely on Zoom. The only semi-recognisable name in the cast was Charlie Tahan from Ozark, although YouTuber Eric Tabach played the leading role. Intriguingly, the movie reportedly cost nothing to make; as in, director Christian Nilsson literally spent zero dollars on it. Despite this, the movie made $25,488 at the box office, enough to put it in the history books.
How exactly did an indie horror movie, which more accurately qualifies as a short and cost nothing to make, pip Nolan to the punch as the first new release number one movie after cinemas opened their doors again? Well, depending on how you look at it, Unsubscribe‘s journey to the mountaintop is either an ingenious piece of creative thinking from two young, hungry filmmakers or a cynical publicity stunt designed to generate quick headlines.
In March 2020, Nilsson, a former Buzzfeed employee, was gearing up to shoot his feature film debut. He had raised $1.3million in funding and was all set to begin, but then the pandemic hit, and it all went away. At the same time, his buddy Tabach was made redundant by the production company he worked for, leaving both men facing an existential crisis over what to do with their futures.
Then, Tabach had a brainwave: what would it take to make a YouTube video the number one movie in America? He had no clue how actually to accomplish such a thing, but luckily, he knew Nilsson had gained some experience with movie distribution while working on his ill-fated feature. Given the state of the moviegoing experience at that time, with exceedingly few cinemas trading, Nilsson pretty quickly came up with an idea.
“I explained to him this concept of four walls,” Nilsson told Spotlight magazine. He told Tabach in layman’s terms that, traditionally, if a movie plays in a cinema, a ticket costs $10, with $5 of that going to the cinema itself, and the other $5 going to the movie studio that made the film. It then distributes that $5 as it sees fit among the studio coffers, filmmakers, cast etc. However, if a studio were to “four wall” a movie’s release, they’d buy out a specific cinema for a flat fee, meaning that the entire $10 from every ticket sold would be the studio’s to keep.
Using this tactic, Nilsson saw an opening to game the system, with so few cinemas being open. “I explained…we can probably get a theatre for near nothing,” Nilsson continued. “We can then essentially buy the tickets ourselves, and the money will be funnelling out of our right pocket into our left pocket.” With so few other releases on offer to compete with whatever they chose to make, Nilsson knew the road to hitting number one was arguably the clearest it would ever be.
So, the friends sprang into action, enlisting their various contacts made over the years to help them make a short movie about a group of YouTubers stalked and killed by a vengeful internet troll. Nilsson wrote the script on a Saturday, and it was subsequently filmed from Monday to Friday. “It was an incredibly fast process for us to get through this,” Nilson admitted, “and we had to be fast, because we didn’t know when theatres were opening. We were able to get a movie done – with an original score, no less, with this reputable cast – in under a month.”
Everything subsequently came to fruition on June 20th at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Centre in New York. Nilsson and Tabach hired out the cinema for the day and bought every single ticket for five showings of Unsubscribe, totalling a cost of $25,488 – which they soon reclaimed, of course. Then, they reported their numbers and waited to see if that amount was enough to beat the drive-in cinemas that had begun gaining popularity across the US. “It was a very stressful 12 hours of us just refreshing the page,” Nilsson chuckled. “There was a moment around noon, the following day, when we saw that we had the number one spot.”
During “a very unique situation”, Nilsson and Tabach figured out a scheme to get their hastily assembled ‘movie’ to the top of the charts. “It was absurd,” Nilsson admitted of their accomplishment/shameless publicity grab. “To think that Christopher Nolan was supposed to have the number one movie. It was crazy.”
