Karl Urban Blames Marketing For Dredd Failure At The Box Office

Dredd 3D is one of my personal favorite comic book adaptations of all time; if not #1, it's at least in the top three.

That's a not-uncommon reaction for those who have seen the film; it has inspired such passion in its fan base that in spite of a dreadful opening weekend that all-but-assured the franchise was dead, there has been nonstop talk about trying to figure out how to make a sequel, spinoff, or TV series more or less ever since it was released.

The film's star, Karl Urban, is one of its most vocal supporters. A Judge Dredd fan himself, he did what Sylvester Stallone refused to and made an entire film where Dredd never removes the helmet (a long-standing convention in the comics in which Dredd appears).

He's also been hoping against hope for a sequel all this time, even while heading off to bigger and more money-making comic book roles like Thor: Ragnarok.

"Dredd represented a failure in marketing. I saw the tracking of that film weeks before it came out and the fundamental problem was no one knew it was being released," Urban told Yahoo! News. "Once it came out on DVD and it sold 750,000 copies in the first week alone in North America alone, it was very clear that the audience had discovered it."

That tracks with anecdotal stories from around the time of release; a Dredd screening in San Diego the week of Comic Con International that year was standing room only and met with a standing ovation; when it came to theaters in my area months later, it opened on only a single screen in my area, and I never saw a TV spot.

You can next see Urban in Star Trek Beyond.