‘Delgo’ Sets a Record
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008
The animated feature film Delgo set the record this weekend for the worst wide-release opening EVER.
The film opened on 2,160 screens and went home with gross of only $511,920. That’s roughly a $237 per screen average, which breaks down to about two people watching the film per showing. In comparison, the Golden Globe-nominated Doubt earned close to the same amount, but was only released on 15 screens.
Delgo’s plot is as follows:
“In an exotic divided land, Delgo, an adventurous dreamer but naive teenager, must rally his group of troubled youth and some unlikely friends to protect their world from conflict between the terrestrial Lockni people, who harness the mysteries of the land, and the winged Nohrin people, who rule the skies.”
But the real story isn’t the film itself, but in fact the story behind it.
Delgo’s journey began when a 36-year-old entrepreneur named Marc Adler suddenly decided that he wanted to try his hand at directing and producing a $40 million computer animated children’s film. But rather than pitch his idea and inexperience to an animation studio like Disney or Dreamworks, Adler decided to work completely independent of Big Hollywood.
Begining in 2001, Adler and his small Atlanta-based animation company Fathom Studios worked for years on an impossibly tight budget. They managed to lined up an impressive cast of voice actors including Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Val Kilmer, Malcolm McDowell, Kelly Ripa, and Anne Bancroft in her final role (passing away in 2005).
When Adler couldn’t get a Hollywood studio interested in releasing his film, he decided to gamble yet again by releasing it himself through Freestyle Releasing. But unfortunately, Adler’s huge risk didn’t pay off. Getting the film into theaters was one thing, but getting people to actually show up was quite another. Having spent the rest of the film’s budget on distribution, there wasn’t anything left for the sort of marketing budget needed to make a film stand out in the already crowded holiday movie season.
What began as the makings for a great underdog story, ended with said underdog biting off more than he could chew.
(Yahoo)
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That’s just what happens when you have NO marketing strategy. But god bless em for trying.
Hey, the guy made history.
Makes sence, I think this site was the only place I even heard of this movie. I think it’ll make most of its money on dvd when kids see the cover at the video easy.
My roommate walked in and I told him about this. he replied ‘whats Delgo?’ that’s gotta tell you something.
I wanted to go see it this weekend after reading this, but its already gone from my theater, lol
I cant see this comming out in australia other than on dvd
Yeah I actually watched about five minutes of this from the booth the other day…. that’s all i needed to see. But then again I’m no nine year old.
Wow! The not geekin tag really killed this movie.
I’ve known about Delgo for about eight years now. That article says they started working on it in 2001, but it has been around for a bit longer than that.
I saw a trailer for the movie almost that far back, and the stuff they have in the trailers now looks marginally better visually. The actual movement still looks very uninspired, and the facial animation is stiff, boring, and unemotional. I think the movie has very poor character design, and the story looks to be pretty weak. The acting in the trailers is very cheesey, even for a cartoon.
All of that said, I was hoping they would succeed because of where the movie came from. It’s a great underdog story, but the ending didn’t turn out to be very happy for Fathom Studios. When Delgo finally got distribution earlier this fall, I was happy for them, but you could almost see this coming. They didn’t really advertise the movie, so quality aside, nobody will go to a movie if they have no idea what it is or even that it was released.
I work for a small animation studio in North Carolina. We have been working on an animated feature for several years now, and I hope that our movie doesn’t end up like Delgo, and I also hope that Delgo’s failure doesn’t hurt our chances of making it into theaters.
Yeah i feel like the distribution for this film was rushed. My guess is that once they got the distribution rolling they either ran out of time or money (my guess is both) to run any kind of marketing strategy. It also looks like they may have rushed some post-production elements as well to meet deadlines. Post is one of the most important aspects of production. If you rush through or skip any part of it you could end up dead.
@Polygon_Wizard
2009-2001 = 8 years
I know that equals eight years, but I remember hearing about it before 2001. Maybe I’m just remembering incorrectly. Regardless, they were working on Delgo for a very long time.
According to Wikipedia, the main guy first began working on it in 1999.