Waverly Films’ Clown Trailer Leads to Eli Roth Film

The latest in a long string of YouTube videos leading their creators to lucrative development deals with major motion picture studios comes from old school YouTube favorite, Waverly Films.

The collective of seven Brooklyn filmmakers are best known in the web series world for their Atom.com series Stickman Exodus – the story of a group of brave stick figures trying to traverse dangerous scribbles and end up on the promised page of a middle schooler’s lab notebook – and winning the second (and last) YouTube Sketchies Comedy Contest – a short-lived, annual event aimed at finding, celebrating, and rewarding YouTube’s most talented comedy creators.

But in the near future, the greater public may know Waverly Films as the talented individuals behind that Eli Roth gore flick with the clown.

Waverly Films uploaded a teaser to a fake movie called Clown a little over a month ago. In 78 seconds, the trailer depicts pithy scenes from a film inspired by the mask part of The Mask

, the Cowboy Dan no-show storyline in Parenthood, and the whole of It. Local area dad fills in for a clown who doesn’t make it to his son’s birthday, can’t take off the makeup or costume once the party’s over, and slowly transforms into some Barnum and Bailey version of Brundlefly.

The creators of Clown took a page out of Alex Brownstein‘s playbook and included a card in the trailer that reads, “From Master of Horror Eli Roth.” The trailer made it’s way back to Roth. Four weeks later Deadline reported Roth is on board to produce the film. Waverly Films’ own Jon Watts will direct and Watts and Waverly colleague, Christopher D. Ford will pen the script.