[MUSIC PLAYING]
[RUMBLING]
There's nowhere to go.
Nowhere to hide.
We're everywhere.
This film should have been one of the biggest
hits of the '90s.
Some of the biggest young stars, a writer
at the top of his game, and one of the most ambitious directors
on the planet.
With a mixture of chemicals like that,
there was no way this film could fail.
Right?
Wrong.
We're talking about The Faculty.
The 1998 cult classic is saturated
in the influence of a dozen successful franchises that
came before it.
It's 18 slasher at its core but with a weird sci-fi
twist, a film about a group of teenagers
who are trying to avoid getting killed by a high school
faculty who one by one fall prey to an assimilating alien hive
mind.
The Faculty draws heavily from films
like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Stepford
Wives, and The Thing while utilizing an ensemble
cast of young performers that feels
like it was pulled straight out of a John Hughes movie.
The film has celebrity performances
in all the right places.
John Stewart, Salma Hayek, and Robert Patrick
all deliver high quality performances and a young cast
of attractive Hollywood newcomers
gave us some of the first big screen
performances from Josh Hartnett, Jordana Brewster, and Clea
DuVall, even Usher.
Screenplay was written by Kevin Williamson, who was rapidly
developing a reputation for penning successful teen scream
franchises with hits like Scream and I
Know What You Did Last Summer.
Dimension Films tapped Robert Rodriguez
to direct, who was just coming off a cult classic of his own,
From Dusk Till Dawn.
Everything was pointing to The Faculty
being a genre defining box office success,
so what happened here?
How could a film that on paper was so perfect
fail so hard in the box office?
Today, we're going to take a look
at how studios tried to replicate success
and sometimes missed the mark entirely.
On the heels of Wes Craven's 1996 classic Scream,
horror films were going through a sort of slasher exploitation
film renaissance.
Scream was a huge success and to this day
has grossed almost $200 million.
Sure, those aren't Avenger numbers, but for a horror film,
they might as well be.
If you adjust those numbers for inflation and rising ticket
prices, Scream comes in is one of the highest grossing horror
films of all time.
This was big news for Dimension, a studio which was struggling
to find their next hit.
They tried to breathe some life into the Halloween franchise
to no avail.
Power of the rune stopped him.
But the production company seemed
to be finding their groove once they
began distributing Robert Rodriguez's From
Dusk Till Dawn.
When Scream was released, Dimension Films
became a household name.
That $15 million film ended up generating a 1233% increase
in revenue, which is a profit margin far too large to ignore.
So Dimension did what any other studio run by money
would do in that situation-- tried to emulate and copy
what they did to the letter and hopefully
generate that success again.
So the problem here is that other studios
weren't blind to Scream's success either.
Everyone at this time was hunting
for the next teen slasher franchise.
Not wanting to be outdone by an imitation of their newly
productive cash cow, Dimension tapped Scream's writer
to pen another screenplay in hopes
that he could get lightning to strike twice
in the exact same place.
They hired the most ambitious director Robert Rodriguez,
and they were off to work diligently on The Faculty.
Shot on a budget of $15 million, which is the same budget Scream
had to operate on, they hired a-list poster children
to fill the various character tropes.
You have the outcast, the nerd, the druggie, the jock,
and the popular girl, a cast that
had high hopes for this film as well.
In a recent interview with Collider,
Jordana Brewster thought after the film's release everyone
was going to be a huge teen star and unable to walk down
the street.
We all thought it was going to be huge.
And then turned out it wasn't so huge.
That's what Dimension anticipated as well.
There hired a few known celebrities
to fill out the supporting cast, which
is something Scream did very well with Drew
Barrymore and Henry Winkler, and even
went as far to fill The Faculty soundtrack
with edgy popular artist.
It's from The Offspring, Garbage, Creed,
and still didn't stop there.
Collaborating with one of the '90s most popular clothing
brands, Tommy Hilfiger, to create clothing advertisements
featuring the main cast.
Tommy jeans make a scene.
Scream being released on December 28, 1996,
meant that The Faculty would obviously
be slated for release on December 25, 1998.
Scream had appeared to pave a very smooth road
for the faculty, a road that they followed at every turn.
But the film did not take off in the way Dimension wanted it to.
It just didn't generate the numbers
Scream did and certainly not to what was expected of it.
It opened to a decent weekend of about 11 million,
but ticket sales dwindled quickly.
The film only ended up grossing a little over $40 million
to date.
It wasn't the 1200% profit margin
that they were hoping for.
And this might have been due to a couple of factors,
the first being audience burnout.
Scream's success started a race between pretty much
every major studio to produce as many cheaply made teen slasher
films as they possibly could.
From '96 to '98 alone, audiences saw the release of Scream 2,
I Know What You did Last Summer 2, Disturbing Behavior,
and Halloween H2O.
It's a very short amount of time for audiences
to see so many teenagers get chopped into pieces,
and they were likely growing tired of seeing the same thing
over and over again.
The second thing was marketing.
As unique as The Faculty might have been,
the marketing for the film did very
little to separate itself from any
of those other teen slashers.
Think about it this way.
How did DC separate their cinematic universe
of superheroes?
Well, they decided to make them ultra dark
for as long as humanly possible, which
flew in the face of the comedic bright undertones of the Marvel
Universe.
The Faculty is a turducken of genre.
It's a teen thriller wrapped in a sci-fi movie
and stuffed into a horror film.
Nobody had ever really attempted to make a film like this,
and the marketing did very little to prepare
audiences for it.
A marketing campaign that should have felt explosive and fun
ended up feeling kind of flat and boring and in some ways
even obscure.
See horror is an extremely nuanced genre
with hundreds of tiny little subgenres lurking within it.
Scream would be categorized as a slasher
whereas The Faculty is more sci-fi horror wrapped
in a creature feature.
Because of this, when you market the movie like its Scream,
you get audiences who expect to see another slasher
and end up leaving feeling confused and disappointed,
not ready to tell their friends what they even just saw.
They thought they were going to see
a movie about sociopathic teens murdering each other, not
a parasitic alien taking over a school with brain slugs.
So what exactly is The Faculty?
Why am I talking about it now?
It's a lesson in hype within any genre.
Creating films doesn't mean creating them within a mold.
It means molding something new within the confines
of what's expected of you.
What's a little scary about where we're at right now
is film is undergoing its biggest war ever.
It's fighting a battle to stay relevant on the biggest stage
film could possibly be on.
And instead of being a unique experience,
lately film has started to become an experience that you
can expect, one you can anticipate, one
you can predict.
See the problem with studios is they
think movies like The Faculty are bad,
and based on everything I've said,
you might think The Faculty is bad as well.
But you'd be wrong.
It's not The Faculty's a bad movie.
It's The Faculty is a weird movie.
It's a risk, and that is awesome.
That alone is an accomplishment.
It is a really unique film that walks in the footsteps of some
of horror's greatest films while being something altogether
weird and individualistic in ways you might not recognize.
And sure it can feel a little silly,
but it's a great love letter to the classic films that
make sci-fi horror so great.
Point of all of this is that there is never
a time where history has frowned upon risk
taking in artistic mediums.
Risks aren't always rewarded in art right away,
but never once were you find someone that looks back
on an artist that took a risk and said
that that risk shouldn't have been taken.
It might have failed, it might have flopped,
it might have changed their career or changed their lives,
but taking a risk in art is always
better than being comfortable.
That's it for today's episode.
If you guys enjoyed this one, you
know the drill-- like, subscribe, the whole nine
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On your screen right now should be two more episodes.
You can click on either of those to stay right here,
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