For months, Smith had maintained that the rights to the film would be auctioned off to a distributor at a controversial event to be held after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, but instead Smith purchased the film himself which, according to analysts, "might have been a difficult sale for any distributor". Smith originally planned to self-distribute the picture under the SModcast Pictures banner with a traveling show in select cities, before officially releasing the movie on October 19, 2011. Kevin Smith listed Mel Gibson as his inspiration for how he planned to distribute this movie, citing Gibson's The Passion of the Christ as an example of a successfully self-distributed movie.