why scott pilgrim failed

Scott pilgrim only got $10 million in earnings and made almost half of its total on opening night, whilst its $60 million budget is extremely out of grasp.
Here are 5 reasons for why it was such a box office flop.


People Over 30 Don't Get It
The movie's marketing was such an accurate representation of the film I think it's fair to say that most of the people who saw ads for it had a good idea of what they were going to see, And they didn't want to see it. In particular people over the age of 30 didn't want to see it. It's a movie about the kinds of individuals anyone over 30 with a job would like to see introduced to a cattle prod, watching a kid whine about how he has to be in bands and stuff and hang out a lot is a very accurate representation of this whole film. It looked like a movie about kids, for kids. However, the target audience wasn’t as good as it seems as you will see in my next point.


People Under 30 Don't Get It
While Scott Pilgrim is about teens and recent teens, the way it goes about telling its story isn't exactly teen friendly. The film is full of video game culture references. However, it’s evident right from the movie's first frame where the Universal Pictures logo is redone using 8-bit graphics, which look like they were created for the original NES, which is when the target audience wasn’t even born, which is a pretty major mistake. The movie's steeped not just in video games, but in classic video game references which kids probably aren't interested in and even if they were, almost certainly wouldn't get. However, even more references that only an older generation would get are included in the film, such as a Seinfeld scene and the desert sequence is a reference to Wayne's World 2. For most kids, the Atari 2600 is just something you get on a t-shirt, and if you reference Super Mario Bros. 2 in a movie, there's a pretty good chance they won't know what it is.



Geeks Don't Get It
Scott Pilgrim is not exactly a geek film. This is a movie about a slacker musician who's biggest problem is choosing which of the two ‘hot’ girls he's dating he most wants to sleep with. He spends his nights hanging out at cool clubs where he rocks out on stage and his days planning another balls to the wall brawl with an enemy. This is a movie about guys who are in bands, not geeks sitting around in their parents' basements playing World of Warcraft. It doesn't have any geeks in it and, apparently, none of them showed up to see it either. Odds are most geeks simply didn't get the appeal of a movie about cool guys with guitars pretending to like video games and stayed home with an actual video game called Starcraft II.

People Hate Michael Cera
There's a reason this viral video containing a collection of shots in which Michael Cera gets punched in the face was insanely popular, and no it isn't because people were excited about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. While he has his fans, people hate Michael Cera. In particular they hate that he always plays the same character and he did it again in Scott Pilgrim. Which is another reason it flopped, too many people hate the leading man.

Scott Pilgrim Is A Musical Without Songs
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a musical. Not because of the indie-rock soundtrack, there aren't really many songs in the film and there's definitely no dancing. Instead what Edgar Wright has done is take the musical format and apply it to, fighting. In a musical characters break into song and dance whenever there's something too big to be expressed by words. Scott Pilgrim uses its fights in the same way. Scott Pilgrim fights whenever there's something too big to express with dialogue, something too important to simply say. It's through these elaborate, colorful, fights that Scott's personality changes and grows. It's because of his fights that he eventually realizes he lacks self-respect, and when he gets some, that's part of a fight too. Except musicals aren't for everyone. the same things which people hate about musicals are present in the trailers and, whether they knew it or not, probably had a hand in keeping them away. Some people simply don't get musicals. Normally that's ok since there's a dedicated crowd of moviegoers who do get it, and show up for a musical anyway, but the musical moviegoer isn't showing up for a fight movie and neither did anyone else.

There were big expectations for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, but only from the handful of people who'd already seen it. But it was always a movie without a specific audience. It's a broad movie built on a lot of different niche elements, and as much as we'd like to believe moviegoers are open-minded enough to step outside their comfort zone, most of the time they won't. The mistake was in thinking that all the different audiences Scott Pilgrim speaks to were the same audience, when they're not.

People say it's become cool to be a geek. That's not true. People have just started applying the word geek to cool people. Hipsters aren't geeks and geeks aren't rock musicians and rock musicians aren't old school gamers and aging gamers don't like musicals. In a perfect world none of that would matter and people would simply show up to the theater and be blown away by the innovative level of creativity on display in Scott Pilgrim, but you have to get them there first.

Maybe Universal could have lied more in the marketing, but it's hard to fault them for being honest about the movie they had to offer. They were proud of Edgar Wright's work, and advertised it accordingly. Deadline says Universal knew it would flop, but they also knew it was good, and simply didn't care. Perhaps they're banking on it finding new life as a massive cult hit on DVD, and that's exactly what it deserves to be. Scott Pilgrim's a flop and it'll take a minor miracle to turn that around before theater owners give up and stop showing it. But maybe, if it's lucky, Pilgrim will find new life somewhere down the road as a must-see Netflix rental. Whether they're potheads or nerds, ravers or comic book readers, they'll thank you for it. It's Scott Pilgrim fans vs. the World.