Welcome to the Movie Club! This week’s movie is Edgar Wright’s iconic millennial hipster action-comedy, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World!
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim comic series. Both follow the titular character as he navigates life and love in a hyper-stylized version of our world built on video game logic. Scott plays bass in the band Sex Bob-Omb, and when he starts dating Ramona Flowers he learns that he must then fight her seven evil ex-boyfriends. Both versions of the story are also set in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and notably feature a number of their iconic locations.
First released in theatres in 2010, Scott Pilgrim received positive reviews from critics and audiences, with a critic score of 83% on RottenTomatoes and an 84% from its users1, but failed to recoup its budget (estimated to be around $60-85 million dollars23), earning only $50 million in the box office. Despite this, both the comic, film, and eventual video game all earned quite a large cult following, and the movie went on to earn over $29 million in home video sales in the US market alone.
- The cast members who made up Sex Bob-Omb learned to play their instruments or sing to some degree for the movie (within two weeks!), although Michael Cera already knew how to play bass.
- Beck wrote the music for Sex Bob-Omb, while Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning from Canadian indie rock super group Broken Social Scene wrote the music for Crash and the Boys.
- Edgar Wright obtained the rights to use the theme music from The Legend of Zelda series by writing to Nintendo and describing it as “the nursery rhyme for a generation”.
What did you think? Share your thoughts below!
Up Next: The Christmas season is upon us, so our next movie is Michael Curtiz’s musical White Christmas! We’ll meet again on December 13th to discuss it. What a pleasant movie to talk about for a Friday the 13th. Check out the trailer and where it’s playing below:
USA
- Stream: Prime Video
- Rent or Buy: Amazon, Apple TV, Microsoft Store, Google Play, YouTube, Fandango At Home
Canada
- Stream: Nothing!
- Rent or Buy: Apple TV, Microsoft Store, Google Play, Amazon, YouTube, Cineplex Store,
UK
- Stream: Prime Video, Now Cinema, Sky
- Rent or Buy: Amazon, Apple TV, Microsoft Store, Google Play, YouTube, Rakuten TV, Sky Store
- https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/scott_pilgrims_vs_the_world ↩︎
- https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tttt0446029/ ↩︎
- https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Scott-Pilgrim-vs-The-World#tab=summary ↩︎
- https://youtu.be/pw3zG6l4yCM ↩︎
- https://exclaim.ca/music/article/bryan_lee_omalley_edgar_wright_kevin_drew_talk_music_of_scott_pilgrim ↩︎
- https://web.archive.org/web/20100715080451/https://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/06/ff_cerawright/ ↩︎