Reach Me

Cast

Production

To build a solid cast for the movie, Herzfeld started with Stallone; the two had been friends since they were roommates together as students at University of Miami. After Stallone committed to participate, other actors agreed to join the cast at minimum pay rates. Herzfeld recruited another long-time friend, Danny Aiello, to play the role of a mobster – but after Aiello declined that role, Herzfeld and Aiello collaborated on creating the character of Father Paul. Aiello credits his work on Reach Me with aiding his emotional recovery from the tragic death of his son, Danny Aiello III.

While shooting in 2013, funding for the film dried up when one of the investors backed out of production during principal photography. Herzfeld, Stallone and producers Rebekah Chaney and Cassian Elwes started a Kickstarter campaign to raise their goal of $250,000 by September 19. Despite reaching the $250,000 goal on Kickstarter, the production team decided to withdraw its Kickstarter campaign and start again with the competing crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, citing its broader and more flexible capabilities. The Indiegogo campaign set a goal for $50,000 starting on September 17 and ended on September 22 with a total of US$178,640 (equivalent to $183,667 in 2016). Total production costs for the film are estimated at US$5,000,000.

Marketing

On July 7, 2014, the first official trailer for John Herzfeld's Reach Me was released.

Reception

As of June 2016, the film holds a 4% rating on Rotten Tomatoes out of 23 critics. with the consensus "Featuring a bewildering array of talented actors pummeled by disjointed direction and a dull, hackneyed script, Reach Me is so fundamentally misbegotten that its title reads more like a threat." At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 21% based on 14 reviews.