Alpha Gang Puts A-List Stars on a Zellner Wager

Alpha Gang reached the 53rd Telluride Film Festival on September 5 as a 109-minute alien comedy packed with movie stars in 1950s biker gear. David and Nathan Zellner directed it from David’s script about invaders who catch human feelings and fumble the conquest. Cate Blanchett produced the picture, turns up late with an eyepatch, and the film still has no North American distributor.

That is the wager. The brothers are asking a prestige-festival room, and then a buyer, to take the same deadpan outsider joke that barely made a million dollars last time, now dressed in leather and A-list names.

The Zellners Sat on This Idea for a Decade

David first wrote a draft in 2018, after he and Nathan talked through 1950s biker pictures, Happy Days, and Grease, then ran the whole scrapbook through extraterrestrials. They wanted the 1950s and Eastern Europe, he said, with every scene from the invaders’ point of view, because a leather gang was “the consummate outsider.” Blanchett later said they had been compiling inspiration images for about 10 years, like something kept in a sock drawer.

The public life of the project was messier than that private mood board. A first cast was announced in June 2020, with Andrea Riseborough, Jon Hamm, Nicholas Hoult, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Mackenzie Davis, Sofia Boutella, and Steven Yeun, and a 2021 shoot in Europe that did not happen. The file went quiet until May 2024, when Blanchett attached as star and producer and MK2 Films took international sales, with CAA Media Finance holding North American rights.

THE LONG ROAD TO TELLURIDE

1. 2018: David Zellner writes an early draft of the biker-alien comedy.
2. June 2020: A European shoot is announced with Hamm, Riseborough, Hoult, and Yeun among the names.
3. May 2024: Blanchett joins as star and producer; MK2 and CAA take the package to Cannes.
4. October 2024: Dave Bautista, Léa Seydoux, Riley Keough, Channing Tatum, Zoë Kravitz, and Yeun are billed for the American Film Market.
5. June 2025: Production starts in Budapest after Tatum, Kravitz, and Yeun exit; Chris Pine, Lily-Rose Depp, Doona Bae, and Kelvin Harrison Jr. join.
6. July 2025: Cameras move to Podgarić, Croatia, at the Monument to the Revolution of the People of Moslavina, and the Hungary shoot wraps.
7. September 5, 2026: The film world premieres at Telluride; Toronto follows on September 13.

David said they would not shoot until the mix of faces was right, “from arthouse and independent to blockbuster films,” and that holding out made the lead-up “very, very tough.” Coco Francini, Blanchett’s producing partner, said the job was to keep “the sensibilities of two brothers making movies in their parents’ house” intact once the scope grew. This is the largest film the Zellners have made.

Sasquatch Sunset Made $1 Million Worldwide

The last Zellner feature is the baseline for this one, whether anyone in the Telluride dark wanted that math or not. Sasquatch Sunset premiered at Sundance on January 19, 2024, then went out through Bleecker Street on April 12, 2024. It is 88 minutes, has no real dialogue, and asks Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg to play sasquatches in heavy suits. Mike Gioulakis shot it. The Octopus Project scored it. Daniel Tarr cut it with the brothers. All three came back for Alpha Gang.

The theatrical return was tiny. The film opened to $91,146 in 9 theaters, jumped to $473,206 in 856 theaters the next weekend, and finished with a $1 million domestic box office and $1,042,015 worldwide. Critics were kinder than paying crowds. It sits at 71 percent of 148 critic reviews with a 6.6 average, and at 66 out of 100 on Metacritic from 42 critics.

SASQUATCH SUNSET VERSUS ALPHA GANG

Keough is the hinge between the two movies. She played a sasquatch in 2024, returns as Alpha Six here, and is also an executive producer. The brothers did not sand the joke down for her, or for anyone else. They added stars and minutes and kept the toilet gags.

Cate Blanchett Produced the Recast Ensemble

Blanchett came in with Francini under Blanchett’s Dirty Films banner, which lists the film among recent wraps. She calls the tone “alien Chekhovian.” She also says the Zellners “point to how seriously we take ourselves,” and that their films are “not geo-locked and they’re not culturally time-coded.” She would have played any part. Scheduling put her in the last act instead, as a thickly accented, eyepatched antagonist from a rival 1980s-style crew the film names Beta.

They’ll ask, ‘What the hell?’

Cate Blanchett, actor and producer

Building the gang was, she said, a jigsaw, and “everybody sort of jumped at it.” The shooting company that reached Hungary was not the AFM poster. Tatum, Kravitz, and Yeun were gone by June 2025. Pine, Depp, Bae, and Harrison came in. Seydoux and Bautista stayed. So did Keough. Francini’s own test for the lineup is blunt: if you look at the Alpha Gang, you might ask how all these people ended up together.

Seydoux was already at Telluride with other European titles. Bautista is the action name in the leather. Harrison, Blanchett said, surprised her most: “There was something so incredible about Kelvin. He’s such a movie star.” Pine, David said, is the domino that knocks the others down, “one of the film’s most memorably outrageous setpieces.” The script gives each of them a pass at Earth. There is no single lead, which is a commercial risk the brothers chose on purpose.

THE ALPHA NUMBERS

• Alpha One: Léa Seydoux, who warns the others that feelings are a disease.
• Alpha Two: Dave Bautista, pulled into a quiet longing with One.
• Alpha Three: Kelvin Harrison Jr., who asks a messenger hawk to go steady.
• Alpha Four: Lily-Rose Depp, who wants a name instead of a number.
• Alpha Five: Doona Bae, another of the crew catching a private awakening.
• Alpha Six: Riley Keough, late to land and first in line for the bathroom joke.
• Late arrival: Chris Pine as a new Alpha still learning what water is.
• Beta rival: Cate Blanchett, eyepatch, accent, and a final-act disruption.

Nathan wanted an invasion movie told by people who “have really no idea how to accomplish that goal.” David wanted “absolute sincerity, never with a wink.” That is easy to say and expensive to protect once Blanchett, Pine, and Bautista are on the call sheet.

What the Alpha Gang Does After Landing

Humanoid aliens reach Earth in 1950s biker kit, numbered One through Six, and try to conquer a planet they barely understand. A human war burns on the horizon, with tanks, bazookas, carriages, and vintage weapons mixed in, because the film refuses a single year. The Alphas keep frozen faces while they dance to doo-wop from a jukebox. They treat emotion as a contagious condition and quarantine whoever shows it. They all have it.

The first specimen of the Zellners’ humor is not a speech. Shortly after arrival, the crew endures what one Telluride notice described as an explosive diarrhea attack, then spends a long stretch passing two-ply down a hall to Keough’s Alpha Six, who is having a bowel movement for the first time. A running gag tracks whichever Alpha leaves the seat up. Harrison’s Alpha Three greets a hawk as if it outranks him and asks it to go steady. Depp’s Alpha Four starts a shouting match over who gets to be called by a name. Seydoux and Bautista share a sweet, unfinished pull that the colder notices wanted more from.

Pine walks in and, in the warmest account, becomes the funniest person on screen, a weirdo clocking “drinks even stronger than water.” Blanchett follows with the Beta gang, more advanced, unwilling to join the naïve Alphas, a Terminator logic the brothers play for costume and accent rather than lore. Blue blood spills. Body parts come off. Medieval knights end up in a Cold War bunker. The soundtrack cheerfully wrecks the calendar, with Elvis Presley and The Crystals in the mix, plus The Ronettes, The Walker Brothers, and Sparks on a pile of needle drops that do not care what year the leather says it is. Jillian Ennis supervised the songs. The Octopus Project wrote the score.

Humanity does not win with a superweapon. The invaders get sad, hungry, distracted, and attached. That is the whole thesis, and it is also the production’s dare: spend A-list time on a joke this soft and this crude, then ask Telluride to sit still for 109 minutes.

They Shot the Invasion in Real Ruins

Gioulakis, who shot It Follows, Us, and Split before the sasquatch film, is back on camera. Scott Kuzio designed the world. Susie Coulthard cut 1950s-inspired costumes that push the gang toward pulp caricature, rhinestones and all. The brothers did not build a soundstage planet. They shot entirely on real ground in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Croatia, with production services in Hungary from The Royal Budapest Film Co.

David said they picked places online before they ever stood there: 2,000-year-old Roman fortresses, medieval church ruins, and brutalist monuments, none of them easy to reach, “which is why they haven’t really been filmed to death.” He also called them “a real pain in the ass to go shoot at,” and said that difficulty is what gives the film its “epic mythic” scale. One of those stops, in July 2025, was the Monument to the Revolution of the People of Moslavina in Podgarić, a concrete ridge in the Croatian countryside that looks like a sculpture and a bunker at once.

That tactility is the part even skeptics keep. The home base has been described as castle ruin, Dracula cave, and chrome spaceship in the same breath. The climax puts knights in a nuclear bunker. A visual-effects artist who worked on the film called the job crazy fun, which tracks with a shoot that treated location pain as a feature. The bet here is visual as much as comic: if the world feels handmade and slightly wrong, the A-list faces can go as strange as they like.

Walkouts and Laughs Shared the Same Room

Telluride ran September 4 through September 7. Alpha Gang bowed on September 5 and screened again on September 6 at 10 p.m. at the Palm and on September 7 at 1:30 p.m. at the Galaxy. The first notices did not form a bloc. They formed the same fork Sasquatch Sunset already taught anyone paying attention.

WHERE THE TELLURIDE NOTICES SPLIT

• The warm take: Tomris Laffly called the film an endearingly goofy, mostly winsome ensemble piece in which everyone commits to the bit, then granted that it starts to overstay its welcome before it wraps.
• The cold take: Angie Han’s bottom line was “an aesthetic in search of a story,” a stylish, hollow collage that stages long dull gunfights and never explains why these aliens landed in rockabilly drag.
• The room: Will Mavity, posting from the festival, wrote that the film had a lot of walkouts, that Blanchett uses her Australian accent under an eyepatch, and that he still laughed, adding it would “absolutely kill” if he had watched it less sober.

The mash he logged is the movie in one breath: World War III, Nazis, Polish resistance fighters, medieval knights, leather bikers, and space aliens in trench warfare with Gatling guns, submachine guns, pitchforks, and bazookas. Another festival viewer said that even if the humor misses, the production design, music, and effects are worth the sit, and that the Zellner catalog suddenly looked essential. A third said Blanchett was having more fun than anyone else on any screen they saw.

That is not a consensus. It is a dare being stress-tested in public. The brothers still refuse to wink. A chunk of the Telluride room refused to stay. Buyers now have both facts in the same file.

Toronto Is Next With No U.S. Distributor

MK2 Films is still the world-sales agent. CAA Media Finance is still listed on North American rights. No U.S. distributor put its name on the Telluride bow. The next public date is a Toronto slot on September 13, billed as an international premiere in Special Presentations during a festival that runs September 10 through September 20.

https://x.com/TIFF_NET/status/2079213836817633461

A Toronto attendee already joked about getting a glass of wine down before that screening, which is a fair warning and a fair sales pitch. The Zellners waited through a dead 2020 cast, a 2024 reboot, and a 2025 recast to protect a tone that still loses people. Blanchett, Seydoux, Bautista, Pine, Depp, Bae, Harrison, and Keough all signed that tone anyway. The remaining bet is smaller and harder: whether a buyer will pay for a 109-minute biker-alien comedy that some critics called winsome and others called empty, after the last Zellner curiosity grossed $1,008,662 in the United States.