It was what they wanted to do with the film.” It’s not Seal Team Six, the movie that you hear about. “They didn’t want to make it into something that it wasn’t. “We were really confident in their marketing plan,” he explains. Relativity paid a reported $13 million for the rights but Waugh insists it wasn’t about the money. We followed the SEALs and tried to keep up.” No one has ever done a movie where they have followed the best of the best into the field, who are actually not actors. “We look at it as a new breakthrough in filmmaking,” says Relativity CEO Ryan Kavanaugh, “and a new way of giving people an experience that is a combination of football and video games. “There was a bidding war and Relativity Media won.” “All the distributors showed up,” says Waugh. It wasn’t just the death of Bin Laden, but the intensity and level of realism and action in the movie that caught their interest. PHOTOS: Democrats and Republicans’ Favorite Movies A month and a half later we said now we will have a onetime screening. “We wanted the SEALs to have their glory, not somebody else grabbing the limelight so we pulled the picture down and said no were not selling it right now, not until the heat has calmed down.

“We actually pulled the picture for over a month,” recalls Waugh. Bruckheimer Productions is working with ABC on a TV pilot about the Seal’s family life and missions.īut while some might have considered the burst of publicity that swirled around that death a way to boost the prospects for an action movie about Navy SEALs who fight real world terrorists (but not Bin Laden), the Bandito brothers were put off. Sony won the bidding for a movie about the SEALs who got bin Laden from Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal.

Universal is developing Lone Survivor, about a SEAL who fights against terrible odds in the mountains of Afghanistan. In short order, a number of projects were snapped up in the wake of the death of the Al Qaeda leader. Then in early May, a month before they were to unveil their project, Osama Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, taken out by a team of U.S. I think some eyes got opened up over the last year about our statement.”Ī year ago, with the film completed for under $20 million, the Bandito Brothers were ready to show it to distributors, looking for the right one to pick it up for distribution. “We said to Hollywood in the beginning we don’t have stars,” says Waugh. His pitch to Hollywood at the time fell flat, but it is now the basis of how Relativity Media is marketing the film. “That’s why we ended up funding it ourselves and finding private equity and why we really made a truly independent film with this.” “Nobody from Hollywood wanted us to make it,” says Waugh.

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