M. Night Shyamalan thought the marketing campaign for “Unbreakable” was, well, broken.
The “Trap” director told GQ in the below video that while his 2000 film “Unbreakable” was a superhero film, the studio was “too scared” to label it as such. Instead, executives wanted to emphasize Shyamalan’s success with “The Sixth Sense,” which also starred “Unbreakable” actor Bruce Willis, and position the film as a horror-thriller despite its comic book-inspired storyline.
“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.’”
“Unbreakable” starred Willis as David Dunn, a man who survives a train crash with no injuries and realizes that he has superhuman strength. A disabled comic book store owner Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) begins to manipulate David and control his powers. The film was a Touchstone Pictures production and distributed by Buena Vista Pictures.
“That was literally the thing that was like, no one will go see a movie about a comic book,” Shyamalan recalled the studio, which he did not name, telling him. “That was literally like, you can’t do it. 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 or sold.”
In fact, the botched marketing led to Shyamalan in part being pigeonholed as a horror-only filmmaker.
“Other people were coming and going, ‘That wasn’t scary,’” Shyamalan said of the reception to “Unbreakable” at the time. “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.”
“Unbreakable,” however, was listed by Time as one of the top ten superhero films ever. The feature went on to spawn a trilogy, with Shyamalan’s “Split” being set in the same universe. The 2017 film included a cameo by Willis, who reprised his role as David. The third feature, 2019’s “Glass,” also brought back Jackson.
Read Shyamalan’s recent interview with IndieWire here.
