M. Night Shyamalan has revealed that the studio behind Unbreakable refused to market the film as a comic book adaptation because they believed audiences would not be interested.
Speaking to GQ, Shyamalan recalled some of his most famous films, including 2000’s “Unbreakable,” starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. He recalled that the studio wanted to market the film as a thriller similar to Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense,” which came out the year before and was a huge success.
“If you deny what it is because you’re afraid it’s different, you rob it of all its power,” Shyamalan said. “They said, ‘We made one of the greatest movies of all time, and the same two people are making another movie. Let’s make it look like that movie,’ as opposed to what it was, which was the beginning of a whole genre. They didn’t recognize it because they were too afraid to say the word ‘comic book.'”
“That was literally the thing that nobody would see a movie about a comic book,” he continued. “And I thought, ‘I love it! Maybe there are other people who would look at this as a myth and enjoy it.’ In my mind, it was a movie that said, ‘The guy has an accident where everyone dies except him, and he doesn’t have a scratch on him, and someone says, ‘I know why that happened. You’re a real superhero.’ That’s the movie, but that was never said and never sold.”
Unbreakable tells the story of a man who has spent his entire life never realizing his full potential until a devastating accident makes him realize he may have superpowers. It’s a dark superhero film, but Shyamalan believes it failed to meet audience expectations because of the way it was marketed.
“Other people would come and go and say, ‘That wasn’t scary,'” Shyamalan recalled. “And I thought, ‘Who said it was going to be like that? Who said it was going to be scary?’ And so (I learned) a really interesting lesson: If I want to be the purveyor of original stories for my life, I have to find partners who understand that we’re going to reinvent ourselves every time, and we should celebrate that.”
Shyamalan’s humanistic take on the superhero genre is now widely regarded as being ahead of its time. The film received generally positive reviews, 70% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the film’s ability to stay true to and subvert classic superhero cliches later earned it cult status.
Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on X/Twitter. Here.
