Eric Falconer

To echo Alan, our long term goal in this has always been to revive the franchise. If this performs well, there's a great chance we get the series back, or a few more movies. But it all hinges on the numbers for The Rise of Thadland. I've telling people if they want more BMS, they shouldn't steal this movie. Buy this movie, then when we make more, you can steal the sequels.

The funniest prank anybody pulled on set was giving Romanski an acting job.

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This is a great question. We rarely felt limited in series. Maybe a handful of things we really wanted to do that they said no to. Actually, Spike let us get away with so much on the series, that it was difficult to figure out ways to top that in the feature. We knew people were going to expect more from Thadland, but how do you do that (besides boobies)? We figured it out, that's for sure, but it was a topic of debate for a while during the writing process. Once we were in production it was very strange to not have anybody telling us "no" or setting limits. We wrote all this crazy shit and then I would have panic attacks during filming, wondering if we're going too far. I specifically remember a day we were shooting the naked fight scene and I see Romanski trying to fluff himself off camera... trying to get hard for the scene, and I was like "Somebody needs to pull the plug on this! We can't shoot this!". So it was strange being the final line on stuff like that, but it worked out in the end. It's all in there minus a few shots. Thanks for supporting the cause, friend!

There are a lot of long answers to this question. Short answer is it was Lionsgate decision. That being said, even if we had self distributed this movie, we wouldn't have done much different. We would have probably done some kind of limited theatrical release for opening weekend or something like that, but ultimately it would have been a digital, straight to consumer release. This movie is tough because nobody fully knows what our fanbase looks like. Netflix doesn't release data, so the only data Lionsgate or anybody has to go on are the Neilson ratings from Spike TV three years ago. It would have been a risky move for them to dump a ton of money into marketing and releasing this movie theatrically without any hard numbers to back up that decision. That's why it's so important for fans of the series and movie to buy this movie. This is our chance to show the world and all the studios and networks what our fanbase actually looks like. The Kickstarter numbers opened a lot of eyes, but people will ultimately judge this movie by sales numbers.

Also look at what happened to Entourage. They thought they knew what their fanbase looked like and that movie tanked. Didn't help that the movie itself was a pile of shit, but they took a bath in the box office considering what they spent. It makes sense that Lionsgate would look at that example of a TV show made into a movie and try to learn something from it.

We are trying to put together a tour though, and hopefully theater screenings will be a part of that tour.

Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?

MOJITOS!

Our goal is to make this movie a celebration of the series, only bigger and crazier. We'd love to have Sam and all of our former cast in the movie are working toward making that happen.

Ha! Yes! So happy you caught that. We've been friends with Roiland and Harmon and the whole Rick and Morty crew for years. We all go back to the Channel 101 days. I was looking for a cartoon to use for that quick Future Thad segment and I remembered Justin's old 101 show "Unbelievable Tales" which I fucking love. I called Justin and asked if we could use the Little Dipper segment for the movie and he said yes. Also, Sevan Najarian who worked on those early 101 cartoons ended up doing a lot of our special effects for the movie. He also produced the Thad on Kimmel video we used to announce the Kickstarter early on. He's the guy who actually had the hi res version of Unbelievable Tales for us to use.

We shot the series in Montreal, QC. During season 3 we decided to throw a "pre-wrap" party half way through production. Romanski had about 200 people in his apartment, and by the time I got there, he was so fucked up on mushrooms that he had to leave and go stay in a hotel for the night. All night people were asking me where the owner of the apartment was and I had to explain that he was at a hotel for the night. He missed a lot of great things at his own party. What I remember most from that night is Rob Ramsay who played Donnie on the show, coming up to me and telling me there were so many people on the fire escape that it had detached from the building and was about to collapse. We got everyone off the fire escape safely, but it was a close call. The next day Romanski called me saying "What'd I miss?".