A film made in quarantine has topped the US box office charts despite costing 'absolutely nothing' to make and earning a profit of 'zero dollars' in cinemas.
Horror film Unsubscribe reached the top of the charts for one day earlier this month after some enterprising producers noticed a unique opportunity due to cinemas across the US remaining closed.
Eric Tabach - a YouTuber and one of the producers behind the unexpected box office 'hit' - spoke to Moncrieff about what happened.
He said: "[Unsubscribe is] a horror film that takes place on a computer screen - we shot it all on Zoom, social distancing the entire time. It's basically about YouTubers who get on a call, and they get haunted by a crazy fan."
The film stars a group of YouTube stars, as well as Ozark cast member Charlie as the main villain.
Eric said: "We were surprised we were able to get these people, but I guess because everyone was bored, quarantined and had nothing better to do they were excited about it."
"It cost us absolutely nothing - I'd say it's a pretty low budget film."
Eric and writer/director Christian Nilsson came up with a plan to get the completed film into theatres - despite nobody being able to watched it.
'Four walls distribution' is used by some indie filmmakers will to rent out a theatre for a flat fee, and then any ticket sales go straight into their pockets.
Eric told Sean: "We realised only during this time, when theatres are making almost no money and there are no theatres open... we could rent out a theatre for a small flat fee, and then we could sell out every single seat... and [the money] would go straight pack into our pockets.
"We rented out a big theatre with a lot of seats, played the movie five times, bought out the seats every time... It went straight pack into our pockets and we reported the number."
The fee to rent the theatre was minimal, and ultimately subtracted from the final profit (zero dollars).
There was initially issue with the popular box office tracking site Box Office Mojo, as the IMDB-owned site initially rejected the Unsubscribe crew's box office reports. However, the site ultimately accepted it and the unusual box office feat was recognised.
The producers were at one staged scared they might have gotten 'bumped' by The Wretched - a low-budget horror movie which has been screening in some drive-thru cinemas and streaming sites which support independent cinemas.
However, ultimately Unsubscribe 'earned' $25,488 on June 10th - around $3,000 more than The Wretched on the same day.
Eric said: "It's way more publicity than we hoped. I wanted people to pick up the story because I thought it was light-hearted and fun... but the moment one article went up it spread like wildfire the next day."
Christian and Eric - who've now released Unsubscribe on-demand - are hoping they'll be able to start work on some non-quarantine films once restrictions are eased.
He noted: "They're really great scripts, and very different to Unsubscribe. But hopefully we'll be able to make them out of quarantine as a legitimate production."
