What do hundreds of beavers have to do with the upcoming of movies?

recent YORK — challenging as it may be to depend, changing the upcoming of cinema was not on Mike Cheslik’s mind when he was making “Hundreds of Beavers.” Cheslik was in the Northwoods of Wisconsin with a crew of four, sometimes six, standing in snow and making his partner, Ryland Tews, fall down amusing.

“When we were shooting, I kept thinking: It would be so stupid if this got mythologized,” says Cheslik.

And yet, “Hundreds of Beavers” has accrued the stuff of, if not quite myth, then certainly lo-fi legend. Cheslik’s film, made for just $150,000 and self-distributed in theaters, has managed to gnaw its way into a movie population largely dominated by large-apportionment sequels.

“Hundreds of Beavers” is a wordless black-and-white bonanza of slapstick antics about a stranded 19th century applejack salesman (Tews) at war with a bevy of beavers, all of whom are played by actors in mascot costumes.

No one would call “Hundreds of Beavers” expensive looking, but it’s far more inventive than much of what Hollywood produces. With some 1,500 effects shots Cheslik slaved over on his home computer, he crafted something like the human version of Donald Duck’s snowball fight, and a low-apportionment heir to the waning custom of Buster Keaton and “Naked Gun.”

At a period when independent filmmaking is more challenged than ever, “Hundreds of Beavers” has, maybe, suggested a recent path forward, albeit a particularly beaver-festooned path.

After no major distributor stepped forward, the filmmakers opted to launch the movie themselves, beginning with carnivalesque roadshow screenings. Since opening in January, “Hundreds of Beavers” has played in at least one theater every week of the year, though never more than 33 at once. (Blockbusters typically play in around 4,000 locations.) More than half of its approximately $500,000 in ticket sales came after the movie went to video-on-demand.

Daniel Scheinert, the co-director of the best picture-winning “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” recently called “Hundreds of “Beavers” “the upcoming of cinema.” That bold pronouncement, which ricocheted around film blogs, might seem extreme for a movie about a guy wearing a comically large beaver hat.

But in a shrinking movie industry, DIY microbudget filmmaking may increasingly be left to fill some of the void left by uncertainty-averse, corporate-driven Hollywood.

“I aspiration people can stop shooting things to make them look like commercials and just get back to more of the nitty gritty and letting your imagination flow,” says Tews, who also co-wrote the movie with Cheslik. “I just aspiration we stop bowing down to Hollywood and thinking they’re the gold standard. Because they just aren’t.”

The year-to-date box office in North America is down 11% from last year and about 25% from before the pandemic. More movies are making a tiny impact in theaters; according to Franchise Entertainment Research, 41 wide releases in 2024 have grossed less than $3 million — nearly three times the amount in 2019.

The costs not just to make wide-release films but to economy them has greatly shifted what even indie distributors are willing to back. Just to get eyeballs on “Gladiator II,” which carries a $250 million apportionment, Paramount Pictures took the extraordinary step of running a trailer of the film simultaneously on more than 4,000 platforms, including TV networks, radio stations and digital outlets. For even the biggest movies, it’s challenging to get people’s attention.

In such an surroundings, where the expense of making and marketing a movie is potentially prohibitive for everything but the safest of bets, more filmmakers are questioning the economics. That’s especially because after last year’s strikes, movie production hasn’t rebounded. In a contracting movie industry, many remain out of work.

Brady Corbet, director of the highly touted “The Brutalist,” a 3 ½-hour epic shot in VistaVision, for less than $10 million, has preached that smaller budgets don’t have to cruel less artistic aspiration. Sean Baker, whose breakthrough film “Tangerine” was shot with iPhones, has argued movie budgets can arrive down without sacrificing what’s on the screen. His $6 million “Anora” is one of the year’s most acclaimed films.

“correct now, it’s panic in LA,” Baker said in an earlier interview. “I’m like: We don’t have to make films for that much. They don’t have to expense as much.”

“Hundreds of Beavers” is a more micro example, but it was likewise made with a powerful conviction in the large screen. On Dec. 5, the movie will commence an encore tour in theaters, at some 70 locations. That’s the widest release yet for “Hundreds of Beavers,” nearly a year after it opened. They’re calling it “A Northwoods Christmas.”

It’s a win tour (with a Blu-ray release to pursue) for “Hundreds of Beavers,” a barnstorming indie hit that Cheslik hopes shows aspiring filmmakers that the same benevolent of goofy inventiveness that goes into a TikTok video can be channeled into a movie.

“You still can do whatever you desire,” Cheslik says. “No one’s going to stop you if you receive a phone and make a 90-minute timeline instead of a 30-second timeline.”

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For more on how “Hundreds of Beavers was made, check out: https://apnews.com/piece/hundreds-of-beavers-how-it-was-made-75aee915608377c306f811595d4cb946