Kung Fury

About

Kung Fury refers to a film created by the studio Laser Unicorns and released on May 28th, 2015 free via YouTube. The film became popular due to its crowd-pleasing nature and popular advance publicity campaigns, both intentional and viral.

Plot

Kung Fury is a renegade cop in Miami in 1985. Unfortunately Fury’s friend is murdered by Adolf Hitler, who is a master of martial arts and referred to as “Kung Führer.” With the help of a hacker, Kung Fury attempts to travel back in time to kill Hitler so that he can never become powerful. However, the technology goes wrong – Kung Fury ends up on an unintended trip further back in time than he originally planned to go.^[1]

Spread

David Sandberg, the director of Kung Fury, had created several popular Reddit posts about the film he was making, including posting pictures of characters during the filming.

In December 2013, director David Sandberg decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign using the footage he’d already shot of Kung Fury to make a trailer.^[2] The trailer video, which was also released on YouTube on December 26th, 2015, quickly gained over 11.8 million views.

Due to the spread of the trailer on Reddit and other forums, the Kickstarter quickly went viral, earning more than three times its goal of $200,000 to finish film production before the January 2014 deadline. ^[2]

On April 16th, 2015, Laser Unicorns began releasing a series of teaser videos for the upcoming film release. The first of these videos was a music video starring kitschy 1980s television and music star David Hasslehoff, singing “True Survivor”, the theme song from Kung Fury. This video quickly acquired more than 14.1 million views as of June 2015.

Release and Reaction

The film premiered as a selection of the Cannes Film Festival on May 28th, 2015, and was released on YouTube and on DVD and Blu Ray at the same time. In the first weekend after its release, the YouTube version was viewed more than 10 million times.^[3] As of June 9th, 2015, it has almost 14.6 million views.

Fan reaction to the film was overwhelmingly positive. Vanity Fair said “Kung Fury Is The Best Movie Ever Exclamation Point”^[5], and a Reddit post announcing the film’s arrival in /r/movies received 5,342 points (94% upvoted).^[6]

In an AMA about the film’s production, a reddit user asked if Sandberg felt nervous debuting the film at Cannes, a typically upscale film festival. Sandberg instead detailed seeing the incredibly positive reaction in person:

I was super nervous because it didn’t feel like a Cannes movie and I was afraid people would hate it. We watched it in a room with 500 people, and people were laughing like crazy, cheering etc. I couldn’t hear anything for the first 10 minutes because people were laughing so much. It was awesome. ^[7]