I was just asking if you were aware. I wasn’t aware till people were reposting and sharing emails from theaters about lack of communication on glitch’s end and SBMNE posted that they filed agaisnt glitch underground’s of “preventing the debtor (glitch) from refusing to submit the medium for unjust reasons” again if it’s because of a rating issue then it’s not that big of an issue. I was unaware of what happened to subnatica 2 and Krafton, but now I know. I also saw oversea fans upset that their emails and calls were being unanswered for the finale to play near them. They said they emailed and called and their theaters has reached out to glitch but they aren’t communicating back.
I completely understand their frustrations. Back when it was announced it was only playing at cinemark. I was very upset me because the closest cinemark near me was 4 hours away from where I live but then they announced it’d be playing at regal which is only 20 minutes away from me. So I bought my ticket asap which was great because my theater sold out in minutes. The same way the avatar Aang movie was leaked there was no way people wouldn’t be leaking the finale on Twitter, TikTok, insta or YouTube and to wait and avoid leaks two weeks isn’t impossible but it’s pretty goddamn hard.
A part is my happy glitch was able to get a theatrical release and earn $5 million off of presales alone, which is HUGE for an animated indie company that actual cares about indie. The news I saw today was upsetting because I thought glitch is going back on thier promise about contacting local theaters and they’ve quiet on their end. We have 4 weeks left till the finale so hopefully everything gets cleared up.
And this is where reality sets in with regards to Indie. It makes this stuff way more likely to happen because most studios either have affiliations with known distributors (A24 and Amazon) or have their own in-house distribution department.
I'll be honest, this is Glitch's biggest hurdle they woefully underestimated. Distribution is more about how many people you have manning phones and in conversation with these other corporations. And you have entire companies that just do this.
I think Glitch simply is too small for how popular they are. They are indie and while they function more like a typical production company that does not mean they have the physical ability to also be their own distributor. They probably only have a handful of people available at any time to answer the sheer number of requests they are getting from local theatres around the world and then having to reach out to local distribution companies in every country that has requested to even attempt to broker a deal.
And distribution companies then reach out to theatres to get the movies in those venues. But they do so at a cost. So where they are distributing for themselves (Australia) they are understaffed. Where they are distributing outside their country, that takes people and time to broker these contracts and all of those cost money too.
So I think they underestimated themselves and ended up overwhelmed. They are quiet because they are swamped dealing with multiple countries' laws and different censorship requirements all while getting more and more requests from theatres in local regions. Yes, they are quiet.
I am sure we will hear from Glitch eventually. I would love to hear all about their experience with this expansion and what they learned after the fact. These are growing pains. Everyone runs into that thing they didn't know they didn't know. And I trust Glitch enough to get their shit together and improve moving forward.
Like I said, things like this do happen. This is what transparency looks like and I appreciate knowing what is going on, even if it is messy, rather than sit in the dark with another cryptic tweet of a gif and "Soon 😈".
Or I guess in this case it would be "Soon 🤡🐰".
And I'm not trying to drag this all back to Medrano but Spindlehorse really is the only fair comparison and I would like to remind people of the S1E8 fiasco where Medrano kept teasing the episode coming out and then just never talked about it. Never discussed what was going on with it or why it ended up in limbo "perhaps indefinitely" (quote Vivienne Medrano).
In hindsight we know it's because of Kesha. But if Medrano really cared about the episode for the animation like she claimed ("It's an artistic extravaganza for the team to celebrate the end of season 1") she would have recast the voice in order to release it.
She already had a Kesha sound-alike do the singing but she just had to have Kesha just to say she had Kesha in her web series. And that caused a situation very similar to this.
Obviously not the same since Glitch is playing on a much larger level, but legal situations in the background and Glitch's commitment to transparency has made people aware of all the ways the industry actually works. They have opened up the clock and we get to see the dirty, rusty gears. We get to learn through their success and mistakes. This is gold for anyone else wanting to be involved in independent animation for themselves.
My request to the fandom is to not punish them for that.
