Hard as it may be to believe, changing the future 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 friend, Ryland Tews, fall down funny.
“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 culture largely dominated by big-budget 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-budget heir to the waning tradition of Buster Keaton and Naked Gun.
At a time when independent filmmaking is more challenged than ever, Hundreds of Beavers has, maybe, suggested a new 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 future 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 risk-adverse, corporate-driven Hollywood.
“I hope 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 hope 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 market them has greatly shifted what even indie distributors are willing to back. Just to get eyeballs on Gladiator II, which carries a $250 million budget, 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 hard to get people’s attention.
In such an environment, 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 mean less artistic ambition. Sean Baker, whose breakthrough film Tangerine was shot with iPhones, has argued movie budgets can come down without sacrificing what’s on the screen. His $6 million Anora is one of the year’s most acclaimed films.
“Right 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 cost as much.”
Hundreds of Beavers is a more micro example, but it was likewise made with a strong belief in the big screen. On Dec. 5, the movie will begin 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 victory tour (with a Blu-ray release to follow) for Hundreds of Beavers, a barnstorming indie hit that Cheslik hopes shows aspiring filmmakers that the same kind of goofy inventiveness that goes into a TikTok video can be channeled into a movie.
“You still can do whatever you want,” Cheslik says. “No one’s going to stop you if you take a phone and make a 90-minute timeline instead of a 30-second timeline.”
‘Hundreds of Beavers’ is playing at San Francisco’s Balboa Theater on Nov. 25 and Dec. 5, 2024. It is also playing on Dec. 5 at Berkeley’s Rialto Cinemas Elmwood.
