Production
companies Reagal Films Running time 70 minutes (approx) Language English | Release date TBA Country United States | |
Based on SpongeBob SquarePants
by Stephen Hillenburg | ||
A Day with SpongeBob SquarePants: The Movie (Unauthorized Mockumentary) is an unreleased/unproduced live-action feature film based on the animated series SpongeBob SquarePants, originally slated to be released on November 22, 2011. The film has gained attention on the Internet due to its obscurity, and people have attempted to contact people associated with Reagal Films, the film's production company, which initially were unsuccessful.
Contents
Plot
The plot is as follows: “In this mockumentary, SpongeBob lives above ground like all Hollywood superstars. Afraid that SpongeBob is becoming old news, his boss runs a contest called 'Spend a Day with SpongeBob'. The contest makes SpongeBob the talk of the town, as thousands of kids enter to win. The lucky winner is Seth, and he is ecstatic about his day with SpongeBob. However, the day becomes a roller coaster ride as things don’t go quite the way they planned.”
Production
The creator of the film (who is going under the name "Mr. Orange" for privacy reasons) wanted to create a family film that paid homage to the John Hughes films he liked when growing up. He wrote a script and reached out to a number of producers including Jonathan Salami who has been involved in a number of films associated with Reagal. However, after discussions with Jonathan Salami and many others, it was determined that the film would go way over the budget that would be given to him.
However, the production of the film was still facing budgetary issues; therefore Mr. Orange put the movie’s production on hold. On August 3, 2016, it was announced that a crowd funding effort would be launched in September of that year to produce the film.
Availability
According to Reagal founder Lorrenzo Holley the movie was out for a short period of time before deciding to retract it. After a sales listing for the film was put up on Amazon.com, the movie gained the attention of members of 4chan who began searching for the film in August 2015. During the search, Reagal Films' website became infected with a trojan horse. However, a copy of the site was found on Internet Archive to get past the virus; it gave no further information than the Amazon listing, and other films of theirs that had been previously 'released'.
The movie soon developed a minor amount of internet notoriety following months of the search, which spread to other websites such as Reddit and eventually culminated in the film gaining a cult following with videos about the film getting over 250,000 views on YouTube. The search for the film has been written about by journalists from Gawker and the French language newspaper Le Monde.