One of my favorite movies at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was Cube director Vincenzo Natali’s Splice. The movie, starring Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, is a weird-ass modern day Frankenstein tale about genetic manipulation, and it just keeps getting stranger and stranger over the course of its running time. You can read my review of it right here. Walking out of Splice I was impressed, but I thought that a film as flat out odd as this one must be a small arthouse release.
Wrong! It turns out that Joel Silver and the folks at Dark Castle (and by the transitive property the folks at Warner Bros) have some major balls, and they’re stepping up to the plate for Splice. They’re in the final stages of buying the film – which was heavily bid upon at the festival – and promising it a massive 3,000 screen release with a marketing budget of at least 25 million dollars. That’s huge, and it’s doubly huge for a film like this.
This is exciting news, since all too often the best movies I see at Sundance – even the commercial and genre ones – don’t get wide releases. Splice is very much a tough sell, but going in on 3,000 screens means these folks intend to try and really sell it. What will make this trickier is that the tone of Splice isn’t easy to get across in ads; while not a horror comedy per se, it is a movie that definitely isn’t taking itself too seriously. Best of luck to them, and expect to see us at CHUD pimping the hell out of this movie, which is brave and unique and more than a little awesome.