Dracula-adjacent horror The Last Voyage Of The Demeter is only just getting a cinema screening in the UK, over a year after it screened into in the US. A look at its mysterious absence from our screens:
This week, on 11th August, it’s precisely one year since the supernatural horror The Last Voyage Of The Demeter debuted in US cinemas. Although hardly the most expensive film in the world, it still had a bit of a price tag for it. Blumhouse it wasn’t, with the final negative of the movie costing a reported $45m.
Universal Pictures released the film in American cinemas, and in truth, it didn’t land with much of a splash. The critical response sailed in the direction of two and three star reviews, although that’s hardly out of the ordinary for supernatural horrors. Nonetheless, it had more profile than your standard horror-ish release, opening in over 2700 cinemas across the USA. Universal was rewarded with an opening weekend of a disappointing $6.5m, caught a little in the slipstream of the Barbie and Oppenheimer phenomenon. Still, those two films were on their fourth weekend, and competition such as Meg 2: The Trench and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem had been doing decent business too.
By the time The Last Voyage Of The Demeter left American cinemas, it had just $13m to its name, with another $8m added elsewhere in the world. However, those overseas takings were damaged by corporate shenanigans that are responsible for the movie’s absence from the UK market to this day.
Just to set the scene of the movie – I’ll be quick, I don’t have a wordcount to hit – it’s from Trollhunter and Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark director Andre Ovredal, and it’s based on a chapter of Bram Stoker’s original Dracula book. The chapter in question, The Captain’s Log, tells the story of Dracula stalking the crew of the Demeter as it voyages from Transylvania to London.
It’s not a straight Dracula story, but it’s certainly an annex to it. The point being that even if the film wasn’t much cop, a Universal Pictures-backed Dracula picture (with Javier Botet playing the Count) would be expected to do reasonable business, and at least get a solid release. The movie is partly set in the UK, but was filmed primarily in Germany and Malta.
The Last Voyage Of The Demeter had been in development hell, on and off, for around 20 years before it was announced in 2019 that Amblin Partners – the company still chaired by Steven Spielberg – had picked the project up. As you might expect, the Covid-19 pandemic slowed down the planned production of the film, but still, it was before cameras in the summer of 2021.
The UK release had been inked in for August 2023, alongside its American bow. But the clues to what went wrong go all the way back to 2015, and – depressingly – have nothing to do with the film.
Instead, it’s to do with Amblin Partners, at least at first. Crucially, Amblin Partners isn’t quite the same as the Amblin Productions company that made beloved movies in the early 1980s. Instead, Amblin Partners was a union of Reliance, DreamWorks Pictures (also co-founded by Steven Spielberg) and Entertainment One. That, in turns, affected distribution rights. DreamWorks films were being distributed in the early 2010s by Disney in the US, but the firm now works off the NBC Universal lot in the US, hence Universal Pictures.
Outside of the US though, the distribution of Amblin Partners films was often through Entertainment One, and here’s why The Last Voyage Of The Demeter ran aground.
Entertainment One was having a mix of successes and failures throughout the 2010s, but its asset book was substantially bolstered by having Peppa Pig on its asset register. This, among a few other names, was what persuaded Hasbro Entertainment to snap the firm up in 2019, completing the deal within months of a global pandemic hitting in earnest.
The part of the Entertainment One business that Hasbro was evidently least interested in was the theatrical distribution operation, even more so after Covid-19 hit. It soon decided to pull out of that side of the business altogether. As such, after Entertainment One had distributed Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans in the UK, it was announced that the UK operation was shutting its doors. The London office was closed, staff were made redundant, and it left one unreleased film absolutely in limbo: The Last Voyage of The Demeter.
The movie dropped off the UK release schedule, but the expectation was it’d soon reappear. Especially when Hasbro then elected to sell the film studio assets of Entertainment One to Lionsgate. In a simple world, the movie catalogue would transfer from one company to another, but, of course, it ain’t that simple. Entertainment One was rebranded as Lionsgate Canada (Canada being the original home of Entertainment One when it was founded back in the late 1970s).
There was no interest in resurrecting the closed London office of eOne – Lionsgate of course already has a UK presence – and the UK distribution rights to The Last Voyage Of The Demeter were either kept in Lionsgate’s locker, or apparently homeless.
Appreciating that the US box office returns won’t have led to companies scrambling to give the film a wide UK release, we’re at a point where you can’t even rent the film on video on demand services over here. It’s not had a theatrical release, a physical media release, or any kind of digital release at all in the UK. Let’s charitably say that those in the UK who have seen the film have either travelled overseas to do so, or invested in a good VPN service. Until the end of this coming month, those were the main options.
The curious thing here is that Universal distributed the film elsewhere in Europe. In fact, as recently as January, it took the trouble to issue the film on DVD and Blu-ray in Germany. There might not be a big market for the film, but there’s at least some market for it.
That’s why it seems that Lionsgate has finally concluded it might be worth testing the water. At the end of this month, at 2024’s FrightFest, The Last Voyage Of The Demeter is finally getting its UK debut. In a bit of an auspicious slot too: it’s been scheduled for just past Saturday lunchtime on Saturday 24th August 2024.
And that’s it: the sole programmed UK screening of the film in the year since that wide American release.
It’s something at least, and it should at least pave the way for a digital release in the near future. But it’s turned into a relatively hidden example of how a reasonable-sized movie gets chewed up by corporate machinery, its chance of a wide release killed by takeovers, mergers, shareholders and, in this case, a bit of Peppa Pig. Count Dracula himself would not approve…
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