Artie Lange's Beer League to expand
Wednesday, September 20 2006 @ 04:10 AM PDT
Contributed by: Peter Sciretta
Artie Lange's Beer League needed to make in excess of $1 million last weekend at the box office to expand into more markets. The film played in only a few markets with a total 164 screens, grossing $320,000, which is good - but not good enough.
Just when you thought everything was over for the low budget comedy Beer League, star and writer Lange has announced that the film will expand after all.
"What happened was, in the theaters that it killed, it like destroyed. In a couple theaters it made over 11 thousand dollars per screen. And those theater owners are like 'look, we don't want to give this up, we're getting repeat business,'" Lange explained on Monday's Howard Stern show. "That combined with the fact, and I have to thank our fans man, everyone who saw it went on the internet and bombarded like these MySpace websites accounts they set up for me and the distributors website with insanely positive reviews. Like people saying 'we saw it two and three times,' 'we had to go back because people were laughing over the jokes.'"
"They [The Distributor] were thrilled with the reaction. Thanks to the fans. It's all because of you guys writing stuff on the internet. Thank god for the internet, because every company monitors internet buzz," said Lange. "The fans really came out in droves and F***ing went nuts. So last night at 8:00 the distributor factored that all in and said 'you know what, we're doing it, we called the other cites' and they got a commitment and they're rolling it out man."
Lange says that the movie might even start it's big expansion next week: "It's gonna be, as soon as may-be next week in, uh, I'm going to get the list of cities and list them tomorrow. But The Pittsburgs, Boston, Saint Louis, L.A."
Lange announced on Tuesday's radio show that the film would expand nationwide (we're guessing a 1,000 theater run) on September 29th 2006.
Glad to hear the good news. Even though the film is getting harsh critical reaction (hey what comedy gets glowing reviews) the /Film staff has been really looking forward to this one. And now hopefully the film will expand to San Francisco so that may happen.
