Edgar Wright Explains Why Studios Were ‘Baffled’ by ‘Shaun of the Dead’

Even more than two decades after it was first released, Shaun of Dead is arguably the greatest romantic comedy — that also includes scenes of graphic disembowelment — of all-time. But while it may be widely beloved today, not everyone totally understood the project back when director and co-writer Edgar Wright was first pitching it.

Wright recently guested on the Smartless podcast, and it wasn’t long before co-host Will Arnett heaped praise upon the zombie-comedy. The Arrested Development star explained that he showed Shaun of the Dead to his kids when they were “quite young,” telling them, “This is my idea of a perfect movie.”

Wright later explained that it was difficult to secure funding for the movie, and even to cast it, because the screenplay, co-written by star Simon Pegg, didn’t totally convey what the finished product would look and feel like.

“Shaun of the Dead was a film where — to just read the script, without knowing how I would direct it, or how Simon and Nick would perform it, I think some actors passed on it because they were just sort of baffled by it,” Wright admitted. “Or studios passed on it, because they couldn’t quite see it.”

In addition to Wright’s unique directing style, the finished movie was largely defined by Pegg and Nick Frost’s grounded performances. “You had to see Simon and Nick doing it,” Wright continued. “And you had to see the tone of their naturalistic comedy performance, because you could take exactly the same screenplay and make it really broad and silly and it would be an entirely different movie.”

Thankfully, the pair could point to their cult TV show as an example of what they were going for. “It helped that we had Spaced, and we could show people Spaced and say ‘Hey this is kind of what it’s going to be like,’” Wright noted. “But it wasn’t an easy sell for everybody.”

Back when the movie first came out, Wright similarly recounted how some studios “read the script and passed because they weren’t sure what the tone was and said it wasn’t all that scary and not that funny. They didn’t get it.”

Presumably they didn’t try to sell any executives on the whole “trilogy of films predicated on ice cream” idea.

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