Play It Again THE REFERENTIAL LEVELS OF SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD

When Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright) was released in 2010, it was considered a major box-office flop. Based on a series of graphic novels by Canadian artist Bryan Lee O’Malley, the screen adaptation was a big-budget studio affair. The project was helmed by rising director Wright, who had found success and acclaim with Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007), while the cast was stacked with hot young actors and next-big-things including Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Anna Kendrick and Aubrey Plaza. Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich wrote the score, and he recruited Beck, Metric, Broken Social Scene and Cornelius to compose music to be played by the fictional bands within the movie. The budget was reported to be US$85 million, plus additional marketing costs, with animated web content and tie-in videogames produced to coincide with the film’s release. But Scott Pilgrim vs. the World ended up making only US$48 million at the global box office, amounting to a huge loss for its studio, Universal Pictures.¹

This initial box-office failure was hardly the final word on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. The film eventually found its audience: on DVD, on the internet, on streaming services. It exhibits many of the hallmarks of a cult movie: it’s endlessly rewatchable, and eternally quotable; it’s at once strange and singular, warm and reassuring. And, for a cute movie about a twentysomething slacker battling opponents in videogame-esque fights, it’s a surprisingly deep, emotional experience. It makes even more sense now, in the superhero-saturated contemporary cinematic moment – the film’s comedic treatment of superpowers and satirical meta-movie hijinks aligning it, years on, with Marvel’s more outré movies.

Where many box-office failures are the result of studio bungling or production disaster, is an incredibly tight piece of cinema: a self-contained vision of a comic, comic-book-inspired world – one that has little bearing on reality, yet feels incredibly in terms of characterisation and human behaviour – that’s expertly brought to screen by Wright. Like all of the director’s works, it’s a movie openly parading its own movieness