Olivia Colman helped push the wicker movie Wicker from a hard sell into a viral meme-making indie. The fantasy rom-com is now getting attention for the same reason many small films struggle to break through: the trailer traveled faster than the project could have on a traditional rollout.
Alex Huston Fischer said the turnaround was sharp once Colman joined the film: "But then Olivia signed on. And then, boom!" He added that, "Everyone fell in love with them as a couple on set, even from the camera test," which gives the project a clearer commercial shape than a 14-page short story usually does.
Colman Changes the Pitch
Five years ago, Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer wrote Wicker, and Fischer described the early sales pitch as difficult: "You’re always trying to push the rock up the hill". That changed after Colman came on as the village outcast and executive producer, turning a niche fantasy rom-com into a project with a recognizable lead and a stronger route to release.
Wicker is adapted from Ursula Wills-Jones’ The Wicker Husband and centers on an ostracized fisherwoman who enjoys many a noisy night with her wicker husband. Alexander Skarsgard plays the enchanted spouse, Peter Dinklage plays the local basket weaver, and Elizabeth Debicki plays one of the snarky women in the village, giving the film a compact cast built around a very specific comic premise.
Sundance and BFI London Film Festival and
Wilson and Fischer said they shot the film two years ago and finished it a year ago before it played at Sundance and then at the BFI London Film Festival just last week. That festival path matters because it gave the movie a public life before the wider online reaction took over, letting the trailer land on a project that already had some critical or industry context behind it.
Fischer said, "So then, when the trailer came out, we learned a lot about the internet and the viral loop." That is the real inflection point here: the film moved from a hard-to-sell indie to a meme-making title once the trailer met the right mix of Colman, festival visibility, and a premise strange enough to circulate.
Black Bear is releasing Wicker, and the question now is less whether the film can get attention than how that attention converts once the rollout reaches its next stage. For a small film, the internet can be a shortcut to awareness, but it only pays off if the release can catch the traffic while it is still moving.
