View From A Blue Moon is the highest-grossing surf film of all time

Surf films, or, to put the more cringe genre name to it, action sports films, aren’t always the biggest hitters. But as John John Florence, Blake Kueny and Brain Farm proved this year, the right ingredients and, above all, furious promotion, can have some wildly good results. Unsurprisingly, View From A Blue Moon not only had the top-grossing first week ever for an action sports film, but it’s also become the highest-grossing surfing film of all time. According to Blake, VFABM’s success is based on the fact that it has a big budget, but doesn’t sacrifice its vision to reach a mainstream audience. “You have these $5 million projects that come around every four or five years and they don’t really take off because when a company spends that kind of money they want it to reach a broader audience and tell a story,” Blake told Fast Company. “So they do it, but the filmmaker is stuck between making a surf movie and a movie that tells a broader story, and it ends up in no man’s Land between the two. The non-surfer doesn’t care because they’re going to go watch James Bond, or Mission: Impossible, and the surfers think all the story part is corny.” For VFABM, the goal was to create something that’d be so epic, the enthusiasm would be inescapable (and contagious). “We wanted to make the best film possible, if it was going to appeal to a broader audience it was because surfers would think it was a must-see surf movie,” he says. “We wanted the word-of-mouth from surfers saying it was the best film they’ve seen in years to be the thing that would encourage non-surfers to check it out. That’s the quality that would give it longevity and a broader appeal. Today audiences are so smart, it doesn’t matter if you’re into football or basketball or surfing, they can still see when something isn’t authentic.” Presumably, you’ve already seen this film. If not… shame on you. View From A Blue Moon on iTunes, Vimeo, or IRL.