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The Original Stargate Film was NOT an MGM production?
The Original Stargate Film was NOT an MGM production?
I just read it was independently financed and MGM picked it up for distribution after the fact? HOLY COW! The had a hit fall in their lap there, not to mention the TV Shows!
I just read it was independently financed and MGM picked it up for distribution after the fact? HOLY COW! The had a hit fall in their lap there, not to mention the TV Shows!
S.S.
It didn't really "fall into their lap". MGM was the distributor in the US, and Emmerich and Devlin deliberately sold it to them in order to get the funding to make Independence Day. MGM then decided to turn it into a bigger franchise, because they were aware of its potential.
(Writer-producer Dean Devlin, in a 2018 interview with Forbes)
“The first movie I ever produced was a film called Stargate and very much like [2018’s] Bad Samaritan. It was independently financed. Every single studio in Hollywood rejected it, they all said the science fiction is dead and nobody cared about sci-fi anymore. We found out that MGM had a hole in their distribution schedule, they had no films to release for a couple of months, and so we convinced them to release Stargate. They didn’t believe in the movie and they didn’t really want to put any money behind it, so I spent a year going to every sci-fi convention in the country. We invented the first movie Web site because the Internet was pretty new and no one had done that before.
“We were tracking to be a gigantic bomb. I have an article from Variety somewhere that says, “Biggest flop ever?” We ended up being the largest October opening in history and it was 100 percent bottom-up instead of top-down. It wasn’t that there was an enormous amount of money spent telling the audience “You’re going to love this picture” — there was an army of people who are fans who became ambassadors for the film and told their friends and generated tickets from the ground up.”
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