Despite the mixed response, Mitchell didn’t recut the film. Sometimes early festival reactions can prompt re-edits, but that didn’t happen here. “In all honesty, the Cannes experience was wonderful and terrible,” Mitchell said to the New York Times in 2019. “But it was always intended to be a kind of a bold film, so for me to shy away from that and to be hurt by some negativity, I think it would probably be a little bit silly.”
“Under the Silver Lake” ended up being released in several overseas markets first in late 2018. A24 originally had it on the calendar for June of 2018, before pushing it back to December of that year and, eventually, all the way to April 2019. It’s easy to imagine this was in response to the divisive nature of the film. In any case, it hit theaters on Easter weekend, debuting on just a couple of screens on April 18, 2019. The movie took in $35,270 on just two screens, but was already removed from those theaters by the following weekend. As a result, it made just $46,00 at the domestic box office. Coupled with what it made overseas, the film topped out at $2.8 million globally. A straight-up disaster for a movie that cost $8 million to make before any marketing costs were even factored in.
Mitchell’s much-anticipated follow-up was released on VOD mere days after its incredibly limited theatrical run to little fanfare. That was that. With next to no mainstream buzz, the movie never made much noise and has been left to languish on digital marketplaces and on Blu-ray. Mitchell has also not directed a movie since. He was developing “Heroes & Villains” for MGM back in 2020, and he’s currently got a mysterious film in the works for Warner Bros. that will star Anne Hathaway. But the fact that a filmmaker with so much buzz has been sitting on the sidelines for five years now is remarkable.