After Denmark where Checkered Ninja has made history as the biggest animated Danish film of all time with nearly one million admissions, the film is set to break records in Norway as well.

Last weekend, the family film directed by Anders Matthesen and Thorbjørn Christoffersen was number four at the Norwegian Top 10 after four weeks on screens, with the second highest admission per screen average (94) after Disney’s Aladdin (135). So far 112,685 Norwegians have watched it, making it the second-best non-Disney/non-Norwegian animated film in more than a decade after the other Danish hit The Incredible Story of the Giant Pear (126,017 admissions in 2018).

“We will most likely beat it within a couple of weeks”, said Ole Telle Thomsen, marketing manager at Nordisk Film Distribution Norway who expects the final tally to be around 130,000. 

To achieve those results, Nordisk Film Distribution Norway had put together a campaign that relied on two elements:

  • the dubbing of the film by the local stand-up comedian celebrity Herman Flesvig, 
  • the fan base in Norway of Danish comedian/filmmaker Anders Matthesen, whose previous animated film Terkel in Trouble reached a cult status, especially on home entertainment.  

Thomsen said: “we wanted to use Herman Flesvig to reach his fans (he has 300,000+ followers in SoMe) and engage Terkel in Trouble fans with a new, similar type of movie. We knew that Terkel became a cult-movie among teenagers 15 years ago. We aimed to remind them of it, and promote it as a new movie from the same people who made Terkel, not as a sequel. "Also, we wanted to give the teenagers who have never seen Terkel in Trouble, or know who Herman Flesvig is, the “Terkel-movie” experience for their generation."

Thomsen explains that with a relatively limited marketing budget, Nordisk Film Norway used two overlapping strategies towards the young and ‘older’ target group: “To reach and engage the older audience, we signed Herman Flesvig to do all the 113 characters in the film, and hoped he would get engaged in the movie and push it in his own channels. He did, and we got more press coverage on him doing the 113 voices than we usually get on big, local blockbusters!” “Then to reach the teens, we used foremost Youtube, Snap and IG, pushing trailer and short clips and funny gifts from the movie. It was an immediate hit: we have almost 1.5 million views of our Checkered Ninja videos on Youtube, and we have seldom experienced an organic spread similar to this on our campaign videos. Especially the videos with music from the movie have performed well.”

Thomsen sums up:” We succeeded in getting both target groups to talk about Checkered Ninja, spreading the word, endorsing and recommending it to their friends.”

Nordisk Film Distribution Norway had received a NOK 350,000 support from Nordisk Film & TV Fond both towards distribution and dubbing expenditure. Thomsen says this support was “very important”. “With a limited budget and relatively small campaign towards a young target audience, it was imperative to get extra distribution support to buy enough media exposure to ensure we reached a large enough part of the audience. Similarly, with the extra dubbing support, we were able to sign Herman Flesvig to dub our movie, which in hindsight was a smart decision."

After Norway, Iceland’s Sena Distribution will use a similar strategy for the film’s release in October, with distribution and dubbing support again from Nordisk Film & TV Fond. 

Checkered Ninja opened last May in Finland (via Filmkompaniet) and Sweden (via Njutafilms), without a dubbed version, but results were disappointing.  Trine Heidegaard who produced Checkered Ninja with Anders Mastrup for A Film Production, told nordicfilmandtvnews.com: “Often it’s hard to pin down why a film works or not, but the good dubbing in Norway by Herman Flesvig who did all the voices (like Anders Matthesen for the original version) - was crucial,” acknowledged the producer.  Cultural differences probably also played a role as Matthesen’s politically-incorrect humour was embraced in Norway, but not in Sweden and Finland. 

Elsewhere, Checkered Ninja has been sold to more than 50 territories by LevelK, who used an English language version to pitch it to foreign buyers. Heidegaard said she is curious to seeing how foreign audiences will react to Matthesen’s raunchy humour, although the good reaction from the recent screening of the film in competition in Annecy were promising signs. 

After his first book Checkered Ninja and film adaptation, the versatile Anders Matthesen has already written a follow-up, to be published in Denmark on June 28. He will again write and co-direct the film version for the sequel, with the same creative and production team. “The sequel will have the same moral undertone and same humour,” promises Heidegaard. “For our team, working with the same universe is wonderful. We’re just starting to know the characters and can’t wait to bring them to life again!” 

Production on Checkered Ninja 2 is scheduled to start this fall.