16 Years Ago, a Musical Made by Marvel Icon With No Budget Nailed Today's Huge Trend
Netflix could better chill out while this filmmaker was inscribing his name in history.
Summary:
- Back in 2008, the MCU director independently made a comedy musical for airing it online, which was a back-then massive success and sensation.
- It focused on a supervillain in his struggle to win over his crush’s heart.
Nowadays Joss Whedon is mostly famous for writing and directing the first two Avengers superhero movies, which made the MCU genius of him at the time, and as the co-writer and, later, co-director of Zack Snyder’s Justice League. However, the Internet tends to forget what impact the filmmaker had on the cinema industry before that.
The point here is that during the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America Strike Whedon came up with an idea to create something for online distribution, which was quite a crazy idea back then. He initially tried to line up Hollywood backing for the project but had no luck, so he decided to take over the movie and make it on his own.
By funding the project himself and inviting members of his family, his brothers, Jed and Zack Whedon, and sister-in-law Maurissa Tanchareon, the Avengers director started working on the DIY musical. It followed an aspiring super villain, played by Neil Patrick Harris in his How I Met Your Mother era, as he competes with his nemesis Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion) for the love of his beloved Penny (Felicia Day).
The movie, split into three parts, was only 45 minutes long, and had everything interfering with its success - lack of a studio’s backing, happening in the middle of the industry’s strike and Whedon insisting on promoting and releasing it online.
Indeed, in July 2008 it was first aired at the musical’s website, hosted on Hulu, and was later released on DVD. Reception was overwhelmingly positive, and the idea of the movie’s independent production and the following online release was praised by everyone, even by Time magazine, which included it in its Top 50 Inventions of 2008.
Titled Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog after the main character, running a video blog, it appeared to be extremely funny and inventive, and maybe a lack of funding worked to the benefit of Whedon and his crew’s creative decisions. Besides, it touched on the issue of blogging, which was only in its embryo, as well as online streaming of those years.
Whedon later confessed he made more money from this project than from making the first Avengers movie, which actually grossed over $1.5 billion worldwide.
This shocking fact and the whole story of making Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog should inspire you to watch it, as it’s now available for streaming on Prime and AppleTV+.
Source: Time