Fans of “Scott Pilgrim” got another hit with their favorite world earlier this month with the release of the new fighting game “Scott Pilgrim EX.” And there may be more where it came from.
Ben-David Grabinski, who works with “Scott Pilgrim” series creator Brian Lee O’Malley to produce video games for Tribute Games and previously co-produced the Netflix animated series “Scott Pilgrim Take Off” with O’Malley, told Variety that he’s “open to making ‘Scott’ things in any type of medium that people want to make them in.”
“I love being Brian’s buddy. It’s really great to be kind of the custodian of this world,” Grabinski said. “That helped too. When the show ended and I told everyone that I didn’t want to do a season 2, or that there wouldn’t be a season 2, I was vaguely like, ‘But there’s more ‘Scott Pilgrim.’ So the process of how long these things take is anybody’s guess, because we don’t have Broadway.”If we were to do it three years from now, we’d be like, “Oh, yeah, by the way, we’re working on it.” It might be like every few years suddenly a new iteration of it appears in another medium. I’m interested as long as people want to see something surreal that happens in Toronto, Canada that doesn’t actually exist. ”
“Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice”/Hulu
SXSW
On Friday, Grabinski will release his latest project, the sci-fi action comedy Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice starring Vince Vaughn, James Marsden and Eiza Gonzalez. The movie, which is currently streaming on Hulu, is set to be a buddy action movie with a time travel twist. However, director Grabinski (who served as both writer and director) didn’t want the audience to get bogged down with the logistics of time travel, and tried to keep that part of the plot as simple as possible, explaining it as much as necessary to understand why there were two Nicks (Vaughn) on screen.
“You know (the time machine) worked,” Grabinski said. “You know that guy built it. You know Nick came back six months ago and the machine exploded. So you know they can’t use that machine again. And you know that if something happens to the current version of Nick, it’s going to happen to future versions. That’s all you really need to know. You know, we stabbed him in the leg. You give people enough to know the dramatic stakes in a way, and it’s just about the characters and what they’re working on in the moment, and you don’t want it to feel like they can jump back in time and start things over again, which is different from movies where there are dozens of loops and alternate timelines and stuff.
For Grabinski, the quantum physics of “Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice” was more of a headache than planning a science fiction movie.
“I’ll tell you something more difficult than time travel, and that’s shooting two Vince Vaughns,” Grabinski said. “There’s science involved, there’s huge machinery involved. There’s a lot of people involved who have to actually create the charts and graphs and figure out how to do everything. It’s 60 percent technical and 40 percent traditional performance. But when you have this computer-operated camera that’s as big as a house and you have to program it to work and repeat the exact same scene, you figure out how to get a guy who’s a little loose and unscripted to act opposite you.”
Grabinski added, “You spend half the day with Vince’s character, and the other half with that character (another character), and then you have to put an earwig in his ear and reenact all of that. The whole goal was for the audience to watch it and not feel difficult and not think about anything, and I think we accomplished that. But unfortunately while we were making it, we had to think about it a lot, and that’s not my favorite thing.”
