The Nation Collectively Refuses to Step in Delgo
I wasn’t planning on doing much more coverage of Delgo, the bizarre fantasy CG movie “starring” the voices of thespians like Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt, but circumstances have forced my hand. Did you see it this weekend? I can answer that for you–no, you did not. In fact, almost no one did. Delgo made half a million dollars during it’s opening weekend, which might sounds kind of okay until you realize the movie opened in 2000 theaters.
That’s $239 per theater, or maybe 25 tickets per theater per weekend–not per showing. I think you could pretty easily estimate 5 showing per day, so for three days, that’s $24 earned in 15 showings. Box Office Mojo reports this as the lowest grossing movie to open that large…of all time.
That is failure on a monumental scale. I guess the filmmakers’ bold choice of making the hero and most of the character hideous mockeries of the human form, hiring C-list actors to give them voices, and using cutting-edge-of-1998 CG graphics backfired on them. Who would’ve guessed?
About The Author
Robert Bricken is one of the original co-founders of the site formerly known as Topless Robot, and its first editor-in-chief, serving from 2008-12. He brought the site to prominence with “nerd news, humor and self-loathing” as its motto, raising it from total internet obscurity to a readership in the millions, with help from his savage “FAQ” movie reviews and Fan Fiction Fridays. Under his tenure Topless Robot was covered by Gawker, Wired, Defamer, New York magazine, ABC News, and others, and his articles have been praised by Roger Ebert, Avengers actor Clark Gregg, comedian and The Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman, the stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax, and others. He is currently the managing editor of io9.com. Despite decades as both an amateur and professional nerd, he continues to be completely unprepared for either the zombie apocalypse or the robot uprising.