I haven’t seen “Hundreds of Beavers,” but it’s on my list for home watching.
Directed by Mike Cheslik, the film, which premiered at Fantastic Fest 2022, is said to be a highly stylized silent-era comedy. The film was shot in black and white and was influenced by slapstick of the 1920s and 1930s. ‘Hundreds of Beavers’ stars Tews as an applejack maker in a conflict with beavers, trying to win the hand of a merchant's daughter.
The film, which has a micro-budget of $150,000, was finally released on VOD in early 2024, and has gained a passionate following since then. Reviews have been very good as well — 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and 82 on Metacritic. Albeit there aren’t many reviews logged in as the film came and went without much press coverage.
One person who is an unadorned fan of Cheslik’s film is “Everything Everywhere All At Once” co-director Daniel Scheinert who has nothing but praise for the film (via Empire Magazine):
That movie [“Hundreds of Beavers”] is the key to making theatres fun, and is the future of cinema, and blew me away
The “future of cinema”? That’s a bold statement, and I’ll make sure to watch ‘Hundreds of Beavers’ in the coming days. It does sound like the type of film that should be seen in theaters, but it barely got a proper theatrical rollout beyond its limited release, in just fourteen theaters, in the Great Lakes Region.
Cheslik developed the idea for “Hundreds of Beavers” in October 2018. The film was shot in rural Wisconsin and Michigan across 3 months in 2019 and 2020. Editing and post-production was completed by 2022. It’s since mostly screened at genre film festivals.
Who has seen “Hundreds of Beavers”? I’d be curious to hear reactions from our readers.
While James L. Brooks teased last year that "we'll soon be seeing" Jack Nicholson, 89, act again, and that he was "reading scripts," that idea has now been shut down by his close friend Michael Douglas, 82.