Scott Pilgrim is Bryan Lee O'Malley's magnum opus. On August 13th, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World was released in theaters with high hopes of success from fans of the graphic novel series and the geek community in general if the excitement at Comic Con was any indication.
However, it made little more than $10 million on its opening weekend, and as of this post Scott Pilgrim vs. The World has only made $26.2 million. Fans have been asking, "why is that?" It had a famous leading actor, a hefty budget, flashy and stylized special effects, fast-paced action, and exceptional reviews, yet it didn't get the turnout that was expected.
We can only speculate why exactly this happened. Some say that the Comic Con crowd from which the greatest hype originated was the only crowd truly interested in the film. The mainstream crowd was more interested in safe movie ventures such as The Expendables which came out the same weekend while the romance crowd went for Eat Pray Love.
Negative comments surrounding Scott Pilgrim called it hipster trash. Rather than criticize the film objectively, they would attack the audience they assumed it was made for. A couple years ago, the pop culture clique that everyone would sneer at was the "emo" crowd. Lately it seems to be the "hipster", a group often characterized by their trendy clothes and snooty tastes in music among other things. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World's avant-garde visuals and premise have marked as an indie film which is easily seen as a play to the hipster crowd.
Back in April, another popular graphic novel series saw a film release with high expectations but met with less than desirable results. Both of these films gave free screenings about a week prior to their opening weekends. While the idea may have been to hype up the movie and give critics a chance to rate the movie early and give confidence to an opening audience. Instead, the result seems to be that fans got to see it for free while no one else showed up to watch. That's a shame since fans seemed quite pleased with the film.
Positive reviews remark that Edgar Wright has done it again. Wright was the director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, two action-comedy films that are inundated with their respective sources of parody to the point that the comedy is derived many subtle references to source material as opposed to blunt references like one might see in a Tarantino film or something like Austin Powers.
Other fans call Scott Pilgrim the best video game movie ever although it is not based on a video game and it has just as many references to manga and anime as video games.
Even with little to show from box office sales, Scott Pilgrim will probably succeed in DVD sales.
I'm so sad Scott Pilgrim didn't perform better at the box office. It was an amazing film. (Although at one point near the beginning a girl near me in the audience was truly confused by Wright's style of smoothly transitioning from scene to scene and exclaimed "What going on?!")
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