dave submitted a story about a movie called Delgo I had never heard of. However, his title (the title of this post) is highly appropriate. Apparently a guy named Marc Adler wanted to create a computer-animated movie without Pixar, Dreamworks, etc. and spent several years and millions doing it. Then, he decided to go ahead and market it himself since none of the Hollywood studios expressed interest in the movie.

At this point, I was rather interested in the movie. It sounds pretty cool to try and do something like that, and obviously you have to rely heavily on word-of-mouth to get people to see the movie. On top of all that, you're competing with a whole bunch of holiday season movies. So why did the movie only make $511k on 2,100 screens when it even had several (mostly B-list) actors that people know in it? It could have been the "D" rating that it got on Yahoo from critics. In other terms, it got a 14% on Rotten Tomatoes.

So what went wrong? Consensus on Rotten Tomatoes lists a few factors: too many characters, a banal plot, stiff characters, too grim/violent for kids, etc. So it sounds like there's a reason word-of-mouth couldn't carry it. Pretty unfortunate! Especially since Marc sank at least $40 million into it.