How Adult Swim Made A Movie Without Warner Bros. Knowing About It

Access to streaming may make it easier to select the movies and television shows we want to watch at a moment's notice, but with it comes the loss of spontaneity you used to get with channel flipping. Plenty of people still have their cable packages, but it's not nearly as common in most households. Even though you almost always had an idea of what you were about to watch, some programming blocks brilliantly took it upon themselves to give late night viewers a real surprise, with Adult Swim being the most creative of them.

Unpredictability was the name of Adult Swim's game, as they were at the forefront of delivering transgressive media on television that no scheduling guide could have ever seen coming. The famed programming block that housed "Robot Chicken," "Rick & Morty," and "Smiling Friends" would also take creative gambles on a series of shorts under their "Infomercials" banner. These 4 AM avant garde surprises would often start as one thing, then gradually become something much more sinister, as anyone who saw "Too Many Cooks" when it first aired can attest to. Word of mouth would get out and they suddenly had viral sensations on their hands. With that in mind, it makes sense that Casper Kelly, the mind behind that demented twist on sitcom intros, would be the one to take Adult Swim's experimentation to the next level.

In late 2022, a 15 second promo let audiences know that the late night force was going to take advantage of the yule log craze. "Adult Swim Yule Log" starts exactly like you expect it to, with a traditional static shot of a crackling fireplace set to Christmas music. After those first few minutes, however, an increasing series of violent events start taking place until it hits you that you're been thrust into an entire movie. I praised Kelly's genre bender gamble as one of the best horror films of 2022, and I stand by that.

"Adult Swim Yule Log" throws out the rulebook and takes you on a surreal horror mashup in which a disturbing act of violence echoes throughout time, causing a couple, serial killers, aliens, haunted logs, and a little man in the fireplace to converge upon this cabin at the same time. Perhaps what's even crazier than the film itself is how it got made in secret.

When it comes to feature films, Adult Swim had played a part in acquiring screens for the "Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters," but "Yule Log" was a whole new endeavor for them. It's one thing for Kelly to request the kind of money needed for a short like "Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough." But greenlighting feature length movies, especially secret ones made for television under the guise of Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, seems like an impossible task. Thankfully, the Atlanta-based studio had a card up their sleeve.

It turns out that Adult Swim had a slush fund at the ready, which gave its executives the power to give the go-ahead to projects without notifying the higher ups at WBD first (via Indiewire). Kelly was already a known talent within the programming block's creative roster, so he knew he had to keep the budget request just reasonable enough to dig into that fund and not arouse any suspicions. "Part of the trick is doing it cheaply enough that they don't have to go hat in hand and ask for a lot of money," said Kelly.

The idea for a horror film surrounding a yule log video gone horribly wrong emanated from Kelly contemplating the idea of an entire feature happening in the background of one (via /Film):

"I just pitched that premise to Adult Swim as a sort of a 4:00 AM thing, like 'Too Many Cooks.' And then they're like, 'Yeah.' For whatever reason, I said, 'All right, this is weird because I don't know what's going to happen yet, but what do you think if we made it as a movie?' They were like, 'Well, if you can make it for about the same amount of money, yeah. Okay.'"

Although there's no actual figure determining what the budget was, "Adult Swim Yule Log," otherwise known as "The Fireplace," was shot in 15 days and used its budget wisely, resulting in one of the programming block's coolest experiments yet.

I really thought "Adult Swim Yule Log" was going to be one-and-done. Kelly made it clear that he was interested in expanding his filmography with another horror project, so that's where I anticipated him to end up next. About sometime late last year, however, I started hearing rumblings of another "Adult Swim Yule Log" coming soon. My ears naturally perked up at the thought of Kelly getting carte blanche to push his ideas to even further extremes, especially with the first film being a bizarre genre kaleidoscope that captivated a lot of attention.

What the project ended up being was "Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin' Out," a vastly inferior sequel to the original that wasn't nearly as chaotic, horrifying or surprising. The late night film still retained its share of bizarre interludes, but the pivot from a "Barbarian"-esque nightmare odyssey to a cheeky horror twist on Hallmark Christmas movies just didn't work for me. In attempting to develop the characters from the first movie rather than veering in a completely different direction, "Branchin' Out" loses a lot of its edge and unpredictability. Jokes and other side characters are established as lore to potentially expand upon and I just think that's such a boring way to go about these films.

I'm still curious to see where Kelly takes himself next because he has shown a lot of promise with "Adult Swim Yule Log," let alone managing to transform such a fever dream pitch into something coherent. I'd tell you to go check it out, but WBD has weirdly taken both films off of Max. You can rent them digitally, but if you really want to take a gamble, your best bet to see them, or at least the first film, is by ordering the stacked blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome. Physical media forever!