Kevin Smith's Making The First NFT Movie (And The Baffling Backstory Behind It)

Sometimes, the news that a beloved film director is getting into NFTs kinda breaks your heart (David Lynch, nooooo), and other times, it makes you go, "Yeah, okay, should have seen that coming." The latter is the case with Cop Out auteur Kevin Smith, who is not just selling hastily drawn monkey artwork or short videos via Non-Fungible Tokens: he's selling an entire damn movie that will only be viewable by the up to 5,555 people willing to pay actual money for a fancy version of a hyperlink. 

So, wait, did Smith really make a whole movie just to sell it this way? Not really. For starters, the trailer has been online for a few years: 

The project actually started in 2014 as a movie called Anti-Santa or Comes the Krampus, based on the child-eating Christmas monster of European folklore. When Smith heard there was, somehow, another Krampus movie in the works, he decided to retool the project into KillRoy Was Here, a horror movie re-imagining of that pre-internet meme of a long-nosed guy peering over a wall. The movie was shot between 2017 and 2018 with students from Florida's Ringling College of Art & Design -- in fact, one of those students ended up changing the whole plot when he suggested that, instead of eating kids like the Krampus, KillRoy could murder others on behalf of them. Smith liked the idea and turned the story into "a classic morality tale" in which those who mistreat kids are brutally murdered by a ridiculously long-nosed version of Freddy Krueger. 

KillRoy Was Here's release date went from "sometime in 2018" to "2020" to "2021" to "2022," which suggests Smith might have had a little bit of trouble selling this thing via traditional means (especially since his previous horror movies have failed to make their money back). In 2021, Smith announced that the movie would be sold as a single NFT whose owner would be free to "take it to Netflix" or find some other way to distribute it, which kinda sounds like selling the lamest part of your job to someone else. Somehow, that single NFT became 5,555, with the trade-off that you also get some behind the scenes material, a unique piece of KillRoy artwork (which, in accordance to NFT norms, should look like it was drawn by a teenager on DeviantArt), and the chance to collaborate with Smith in the sequel that will totally happen. 

To our knowledge, Smith hasn't divulged the price for the NFTs, but considering he's also selling a screenshot of his Instagram page for $650, we're guessing it's gonna be way above the price of a movie ticket. So if you love Kevin Smith movies as much as you hate the environment, be sure to look out for that drop! 

Follow Maxwell Yezpitelok's heroic effort to read and comment on every '90s Superman comic at Superman86to99.tumblr.com. 

Top image: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons, View Askew Productions