At the end of a summer that brought us two of the biggest indie horror hits ever with “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” the box office got one last little boost from the genre with the feature debut of a director who made one of the biggest viral YouTube videos of the 2010s.
Meet “Buddy,” a tale of a Barney the Dinosaur-esque orange unicorn voiced by Keegan Michael-Key who ruthlessly slaughters the children and adults who don’t follow along on his TV show. Acquired by Roadside Attractions and Saban Films after its midnight section premiere at Sundance, “Buddy” opened to $5.3 million on Aug. 28, and followed it up in its second weekend with a slight increase to $5.7 million for the Friday-to-Sunday portion of Labor Day weekend.
Now standing just shy of $16 million through Monday, “Buddy” is set to become the first Roadside Attractions title since the COVID-19 pandemic to clear $20 million at the U.S./Canada box office.
Once it reaches $25 million, will become Roadside’s third-highest grossing film of all time behind only the faith-based 2018 hit “I Can Only Imagine,” which grossed $83.4 million as a co-distributed title with Lionsgate, and the Oscar-winning “Manchester By the Sea,” which made $47.6 million in 2016 as a co-distribution with Amazon.
“I know there’s a lot of talk about people in the film business treating it all like an algorithm game. But I don’t feel that at all from this gang at Roadside and Saban Films,” director Casper Kelly told TheWrap. “The team that worked on releasing this film loves talking about the art of it, and I’ve learned a lot from them. And I’m also so grateful to the audience that came out to see ‘Buddy.’ Maybe it’s an audience that grew up online and is open to all kinds of strangeness.”
“Strangeness” is definitely a fitting term for Kelly’s work, as his career is an interesting twist on the YouTube-to-horror-stardom pipeline that had Hollywood buzzing this summer. Kelly’s claim to fame is “Too Many Cooks,” a legendary, darkly humorous send-up of the cheerful theme song sequences for 80s family sitcoms that starts with a seemingly normal intro that starts to run long … and then runs longer … and then takes a hard left turn into absurdity. And that’s before a machete-wielding serial killer shows up.
Unlike “Backrooms” director Kane Parsons’ purely indie roots, “Too Many Cooks” was produced by the Warner Bros.-owned Williams Street, the studio best associated with the nighttime adult animation/comedy programming block Adult Swim, which first aired the short film on Oct. 28, 2014 at 4 AM. It was only after Adult Swim released the video on YouTube a week later that it became a viral sensation, racking up 29 million views in the 12 years since.
Eric d’Arbeloff, co-president of Roadside Attractions, hadn’t seen “Too Many Cooks” when “Buddy” first reached his attention. Kelly’s film got on his radar prior to Sundance thanks in part to “Buddy” producers Tyler Davidson and Drew Sykes, who through their production company Low Spark Films had previously worked with Roadside on the 2022 Aubrey Plaza crime thriller “Emily the Criminal.”
But what also caught d’Arbeloff’s attention was the promotional photo the “Buddy” team had given to Sundance for the festival’s website and program material and which you can see above, with Buddy walking through a forest with fur and flesh melted off one side of his body and a fire axe over his shoulder.
It’s the sort of instantly eye-catching imagery that he says is something Roadside Attractions is always looking for among the Sundance offerings going back to the studio’s first ever acquisition, the 2004 fast food exposé doc “Super Size Me.”
“Think about that picture on the poster with Morgan Spurlock with the fries in his mouth. Are we compelled by the story being told before we even see the film?” d’Arbeloff said. “So we give a lot of credit to Casper and the producers for curating that, and we really built our social media approach off of it. We wanted to make Buddy a star before people even saw the movie.”
But Roadside, Saban and the “Buddy” team all agreed that they didn’t want to reveal too much of the grisly kills that their unicorn dishes out to human children and talking inanimate objects alike, so they decided to add a new facet to their marketing strategy: ditch the trailers.
Instead, Roadside and Saban released three teasers that sold the film as “from the director of ‘Too Many Cooks’” and then proceeded to tease “Buddy” as a film that would share a core part of that short’s appeal: introduce something familiar from a past era of television, and then slowly reveal that it’s all curdled into something very wrong beneath the surface.
“We tried cutting trailers but we felt that they gave away too much of the film, and really that’s something that a lot of people complain about,” said Kelly.
“Connecting it to ‘Too Many Cooks’ really influenced a lot of the coverage and discussion around the film in a positive way, especially since we didn’t have a lot of advance screenings in the run-up to release,” added d’Arbeloff.
The final part of the successful formula came from a later decision by Roadside and Saban to move the opening weekend of “Buddy” up by one week, releasing it ahead of Labor Day weekend instead of on it. It’s a strategy that major studios have taken ahead of more conventional holiday weekends, as Warner Bros. released “Final Destination: Bloodlines” one week ahead of Memorial Day in 2025 and Universal released “Wicked” one week ahead of Thanksgiving in 2024, both to resounding box office success.
Over the past two weeks, we’ve seen that “week ahead” strategy pay off on a specialty level both with “Buddy” and Ketchup Entertainment’s release of “Coyote vs. Acme,” which opened to $15.9 million last weekend and then, thanks to wildly strong word-of-mouth, earned a $16.1 million four-day total for Labor Day weekend for a $38.6 million domestic weekend.
As “Buddy” has caught the attention of horror fans over the past week, it too became a film of interest for theater chains like AMC and Regal, which offered expanded play to Roadside for Labor Day weekend as it went from 1,277 locations at opening to 1,771 for the holiday.
It came down to the wire for the summer 2026 box office to become the highest grossing domestic summer of all time, passing the 2013 unadjusted record by approximately $10 million. It’s not an exaggeration to say that films like “Buddy” made the difference.
“It’s felt for the last decade like there’s this narrative being spun that theatrical doesn’t matter,” d’Arbeloff said. “But seeing all these films that have been successful this summer to me is a reminder that theatrical always matters. More than that, curation matters. Championing new filmmakers matters. Minting exciting new young actors matters. All these sort of basic things that might have seemed old-fashioned ten years ago are now coming back to the fore.”
