“Buddy,” Casper Kelly’s surreal horror film about a creepy, murderous ’90s children’s TV unicorn, has turned into an indie hit.
The film, starring Cristin Milioti, Patton Oswalt, Michael Shannon, Topher Grace, and Keegan-Michael Key as the voice of the title character, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to decent reviews, earning a 67 on Metacritic. It was co-acquired in April by Roadside Attractions and Saban Films.
This past weekend, “Buddy” grossed an estimated $5.4M on just 1,258 screens, doubling initial box-office projections. It’s the highest opening of the year for a film playing on fewer than 1,800 screens. It’s also Roadside’s second-highest opening ever and Saban Films’ highest opening in its 12-year history.
Gen Z audiences, craving original content, escapism, and a communal experience, turned out in droves, with exit polls showing that 83% of “Buddy”’s audience was under 35.
I caught up with “Buddy” on Saturday night, and I came away thinking the movie itself is only okay. However, watching it with a packed audience was a different story. The crowd was losing it — laughing, gasping, screaming — and that reaction is a big part of what makes “Buddy” work. The movie is weird enough that half the fun is hearing a room full of people try to process what they’re watching, and when the laughter dies down and the theater suddenly goes quiet, the creepier moments land much harder. I can absolutely see word-of-mouth getting out of control. This is the kind of film that needs to be seen with a crowd, not discovered on streaming six weeks from now. If I’m Roadside or Saban, I’m going big over Labor Day and putting this in 2000+ theaters.
Roadside and Saban leaned heavily into Buddy’s fictional TV persona, releasing three teasers but no traditional full trailer, while building a social following of roughly 500,000 fans — more than many big studio August releases, including “The End of Oak Street” and “Insidious: Out of the Further.” Interactive promotions, including texting and voicemail messages from Buddy, helped make the character feel like a forgotten ’90s icon.
“Buddy” reportedly has a budget under $3M and, with $707,000 grossed on Monday, surpassed “The Dog Stars,” which had a budget 30 times higher. That $707k is the lowest Sunday to Monday drop of all films that were six figures or more.
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