24 years later, M. Night Shyamalan reflects on why Unbreakable wasn’t marketed as a superhero movie: “They were too scared to say the words ‘comic book'”

Unbreakable director M. Night Shyamalan is looking back at the movie’s marketing 24 years later. 

The film is a superhero movie starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson, and it was eventually followed by Split, starring James McAvoy, and Glass, starring all three actors together in a crossover. 

Unbreakable released on the heels of Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, though, and the studio wanted to market the new Willis movie more in line with the first as a thriller. 

“If you deny what it is because you’re afraid of it being different, you’re stealing all of its strength,” Shyamalan told GQ. “That’s a great example. They were like, ‘We had one of the biggest movies of all time, and the same two people are making another movie. Let’s make it look like that movie.’ As opposed to what it was, which was the beginning of an entire genre. But they didn’t realize it, because they were too scared to say the words ‘comic book.’

“That was literally the thing that was like, ‘No one will go see a movie about a comic book,'” he continued. “That was literally like, ‘You can’t do it.’ And I’m like, ‘I love it! Maybe there’s other people that would think of this as myth as well and enjoy it.’ In my mind, it was a movie that was, ‘Hey, the guy is in a crash, an accident where everyone dies except him, and he doesn’t have a scratch on him, and someone says, ‘I know why that happened. You’re a real-life superhero.’ That’s the movie, but that was never said and never sold.”

Shyamalan’s new movie, Trap, is out in theaters now. You can keep up to date with this year’s biggest movies with our guide to 2024’s major upcoming movie release dates.