Director Adam Green Reveals More About Why Hatchet II Was Pulled from Theaters

Director Adam Green (Frozen) admitted he was "bewildered and confused" as to why his latest movie, the unrated sequel Hatchet II, was pulled from the AMC movie theater chain almost as soon as it was released last weekend. While AMC's official statement claimed the decision was "based on performance," Green disagreed, citing the movie's cult status and lack of advertising as reason to ignore the financial success of a movie opening on only 68 screens. While many media outlets discussed the movie's unrated status and Green's public disappointment with the MPAA ratings board, Green sent a statement to Moviefone explaining his position.

I first heard of Toronto and Montreal pulling the film via Canadian fans on Twitter on Saturday morning saying that the movie was pulled without reason and they wanted to know where it went. If you look at my twitter you'll see that I mentioned "Hearing the film has been pulled from Montreal and Toronto — but don't hate the theaters, they tried." Which leads me to believe that after Friday the movie was yes, gone. Calling the theaters can confirm that.

I've also stressed time and time again how grateful I am to AMC for even taking an unrated film on in the first place and that I more than understand the delicate position of it, but again, people are so quick to jump on them for pulling it that they don't see the merit in what they actually tried to do. How the decision was made to pull the film early, no one will ever know.

Unfortunately every interview I did seemed to only focus on anything negative I've said about indie experiences with the MPAA in this genre, but not my entire point which was that we should be held to the same standards as the studio films. Hatchet or Hatchet 2 are not nearly as offensive or violent as some of the larger fare that has made it by to theaters with an R, mainly because the tone of these films is comedic and nothing within them is realistic or can even be taken seriously at all. In every interview I've asked that all films be treated the same (how is it OK for a scene depicting rape in front of an infant, animal violence, and realistic pain and suffering to get an R but a swamp ghost with a gas powered belt sander killing a comedian in a Monty Python-esque way an NC-17?) but no one ever reports that aspect. It's always "Adam Green hates the MPAA." I merely stood up for myself this time by not castrating the punchlines from my film (which I would have had to do to get an R and which I had to do with Hatchet 1) and had a DISTRIBUTOR that chose to try something different and keep the movie in tact and go unrated.

The sad truth of the matter is that no one at [distributor] Dark Sky has been able to tell me the exact reasons behind why the film was pulled (they have not gotten a clear explanation whatsoever) and I only know what I am hearing from the public on Twitter and AMC's response to the press of "we base our decisions on performance" which does not add up given that we know of at least two theaters that had pulled the film after just 24 hours and given the grand scheme of things, other genre titles performed worse per screen, even though they had bigger budgets and traditional spends on marketing campaigns as opposed to ours.

All signs would point to AMC being unhappy with how vocal I was about the MPAA and not wanting to deal with the controversy — which if the case, is their given right. Had the film grossed millions, maybe it would be a different story with them, but given the size of our release and the nature of what this is, all we ever could have hoped for was a few grand per screen in a realistic scenario.

Green added that AMC was "nothing but generous and filmmaker friendly to even try to do a release like this" and that the unrated sequel will likely be released on DVD and in the on-demand format by Dark Sky. To read the entire, unexpurgated statement, head here.