Kevin Smith Somehow Made a Million Dollars From His NFT Movie
If you’re a fan of director Kevin Smith, you’ve probably seen movies like Clerks, Mallrats and Dogma, but one of his films has hardly been viewed by anyone at all (and, sadly, it isn’t Yoga Hosers).
In 2022, Smith released KillRoy Was Here, a low-budget horror anthology, loosely based on the World War II graffiti meme, and made with a crew of Florida film students. But the movie didn’t come to theaters, or streaming services, or even Betamax, it was issued exclusively as 5,555 NFTs on the Legendao platform, meaning the film was unavailable to watch unless you had the special “crypto key.”
Don't Miss
Two years later, it still hasn’t been made available anywhere else.
Even Smith fans seemed pretty miffed at this arrangement, which essentially prevented them from ever watching the movie without shelling out big bucks to some crypto company.
But going the NFT route wasn’t always the plan for KillRoy Was Here. As Smith just revealed to Entertainment Weekly, he initially reached out to Shudder, the horror-centric streaming service, with what he called a “perfectly watchable, Creepshow-type of movie.” “You guys want to run this? It’s a Kevin Smith original,” Smith told the folks at Shudder. And he was willing to let them have it for “30 grand. That was it.” But the response from the streamer wasn’t exactly enthusiastic. “Shudder was like, ‘This is terrible. This isn’t good enough for Shudder.’”
Following the rejection, one of the film’s producers told Smith, “I met with this company, they’re interested in buying a movie to release as an NFT. And what they want to do is use it to showcase their blockchain technology.”
Reasoning that the crypto world could be a “a new playground to go play in,” Smith agreed, and got a big payday as a result. “The company paid us over a million dollars. I made a million dollars off of this movie,” Smith boasted.
What Smith didn’t mention in the video (or perhaps it was edited out for time) is that the year before the Legendao deal was made public, he announced plans to auction off the film as an NFT to just one person, as part of his own “Jay and Silent Bob’s Crypto Studio” platform. And it would have come with the “rights to exhibit, distribute and stream the work,” which Deadline pointed out at the time would be “a means for whoever owns the movie to earn money outside of the blockchain.”
Of course, no one knew at the time that at least one streamer had already rejected the movie.
Still, you have to hand it to Smith, I guess, for being perhaps the only celebrity in the world to actually make money off of the crypto trend, and come away relatively unscathed. Larry David’s Super Bowl ad for crypto paid him in crypto, Matt Damon claims that he did that dumb “fortune favors the brave” commercial to just pay for his clean water nonprofit, and Jimmy Fallon’s “Bored Ape” sponcon landed him in legal hot water.
You (yes, you) should follow JM on Twitter (if it still exists by the time you’re reading this).
