‘Where The Wild Things Are’ Test Screenings Are Making Children Cry

When that alleged clip from Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are hit the internets earlier this week, the reactions to the footage varied widely. Even though we loved it, a barrage of negative feedback almost immediately began taking root in the comment sections of many blogs who covered the leak (”a piece of crap,” said a Movieweb reader; “looks like a car crash,” said a Gawker commenter). The furor caused Jonze to make a statement defending his highly-anticipated project:

That was a very early test with the sole purpose of just getting some footage to Ben our vfx (visual effects) supervisor to see if our vfx plan for the faces would work. The clip doesn’t look or feel anything like the movie, the Wild Thing suit is a very early cringy prototype, and the boy is a friend of ours Griffin who we had used in a Yeah Yeah Yeahs video we shot a few weeks before. We love him, but he is not in the actually film…Oh and that is not a wolf suit, its a lamb suit we bought on the internet. Talk to you later…”