M. Night Shyamalan has revealed the studio behind Unbreakable refused to market it as a comic book movie, believing audiences wouldn't be interested.
Speaking to GQ, Shyamalan reflected on some of his most iconic movies, including 2000's Unbreakable, starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. He recalled the studio wanting to promote it as a thriller similar to Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, which came out the year before and was a huge success.
"If you deny what it is because you're afraid of it being different, then you're stealing all of its strength," Shyamalan said. "They were like, 'We had one of the biggest movies of all time, and the same two people are making another movie. Let's make it look like that movie.' As opposed to what it was, which was the beginning of an entire genre. They didn't realize it because they were too scared to say the words 'comic book.'
"That was literally the thing that was like, no one will go see a movie about a comic book," he continued. "And I'm like, 'I love it! Maybe there's other people that would think of this as myth as well and enjoy it.' In my mind, it was a movie that was, 'The guy is in a crash, an accident where everyone dies except him, and he doesn't have a scratch on him, and someone says, 'I know why that happened. You're a real-life superhero.' That's the movie, but that was never said and never sold."
Unbreakable tells the story of a man who has lived his whole life never fully knowing his full potential until a devastating accident leads him to the realization that he might have superpowers. It is a brooding superhero movie, but one that Shyamalan thinks didn't meet audience expectations because of the way it was marketed.
"Other people were coming and going, 'That wasn't scary,'" Shyamalan remembered. "And I was like, 'Who said it was going to be that? Who said it was going to be scary?' And so, [I learned] a really interesting lesson about, if I am going to be the purveyor of original stories for my life, I have to get partners that understand that we're going to reinvent every single time, and we should celebrate that."
Shyamalan's humanist take on the superhero genre is now, widely, considered to be ahead of its time. The movie has attracted generally positive reviews from critics, with 70% on Rotten Tomatoes, while the movie's adherence to and subversion of classic superhero tropes subsequently earned it a cult following.
Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on X/Twitter here.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/m-night-shyamalan-studio-too-scared-unbreakable-comic-book-movie