via io9
Fuckin' hilarious. It's like I09 doesn't even have IMDbPro. 'member back when Attaque de Panico was making everybody all wet about the panties? And how soon we'd be seeing ths uruguayan dude dominating the world? ...yeah, that was 2009. Neill Blomkamp had to do like 5 shorts before District 9 happened. It's very easy to say "yay we love you let's develop your movie" but that's almost entirely done to make execs look hip. It works like this: 1) Person makes something on the internet 2) Parasitic manager contacts person on the internet and says they'll be rich and famous 3) Parasitic manager sells something intangible and pointless to clueless studio flack for scale, or $28,950 (PDF link 4) Parasitic manager collects 15% of $28,950 (before taxes) for making a few phone calls 5) clueless flack gets written up in Deadline Hollywood Daily having spent less than 30 grand of his operating budget 6) The Internetz persist in the idea that OMG IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU I know the guys behind Ruin. They've been ensconced behind Hollywood's walls for ten years. It's fuckin' awesome that they're getting some traction... but Tom was script doctoring del Toro's PACIFIC RIM long before this thing ever saw Youtube.
Further, a majority of those pieces* aren't shorts at all, in the sense they they don't have a complete story. They're extended trailers / visual demos; lovely but produced in order to stimulate interest in a longer film. (*Not all of them. Some are proper shorts.)