Amid the big blockbusters and splashy bets, for many movie studios, it’s the horror movies that keep the lights on. Horror movies are cheap, they’re always in demand, and while they rarely see the massive returns of a summer blockbuster, you can turn out a profit. And unsurprisingly, the Slender Man meme was brought to this particular grist mill. But a few months shy of its planned release date, it turns out it’s harder to make a meme into a movie than you might imagine.
The first thing you likely asked was “They made a movie about those girls who stabbed somebody?” And no, they didn’t, although HBO had a quite good documentary about that crime. Slender Man is, well, a pretty standard horror movie of teenage girls haunted by the faceless, multi-limbed monster of copy-pasta lore:
And although the father of one of the girls involved in the Slender Man crime has been leading a campaign against the movie, it was largely moving ahead to its August 24th release date without any problems. Except it turns out the movie’s producers have a bit more faith in it than Sony does, according to Variety:
Sony sees the film as a low-budget, Blumhouse-style release, according to two insiders, while the producers have more confidence in the movie and are pushing for the picture to unspool across more screens. They also want a bigger marketing push, which will cost more money than Sony is willing to spend.
As a result, the producers are shopping the movie around trying to find somebody with the same faith in it. Some might be asking: All this for a meme that’s nearly a decade old? To be fair, even the flimsiest of premises can sing with the right director and actors. Syfy’s Channel Zero has adapted several bits of internet lore into intimate, creepy miniseries. But Slender Man, despite several attempts to catapult him beyond Facebook likes, hasn’t really translated.
Granted, Hollywood in general has struggled to figure out where, precisely, culture is heading in a world where a stock photo can capture the public imagination far more easily than Han Solo’s origin story. Yet it’s a culture so fast-moving that it’s impossible to strike while the iron is hot, even if you’re a marketing company. The problem may be less about the movie or its release and more that simply Hollywood can’t catch up.
(via Variety)