While Harold Kumar Go To White Castle may be one of your cult favorite films, as Kal Penn reminds us, it didn’t score at the box office the first time around.
Like many films nowadays that hit cult status ( Boondock Saints springs to mind), Harold Kumar Go To White Castle very nearly faded into obscurity after its release. It was only word of mouth from dedicated fans after the DVD release that catapulted it to modern classic status. (“Daddy is not coming on anything!”) And while Penn has become famous in his own right since the film tanked, he doesn’t take the success of any future Harold Kumar works to be a given.
Penn says that he still worries the new film will resonate with audiences, and says there are always worries a new installment won’t catch on. Penn muses:
“I don’t think any of us take any of this for granted. The first ‘Harold and Kumar’ movie totally tanked at the box office. A lot of people forget this. It was only the fans who found it on DVD that gave us a chance to do a second one and now a third one. So we’ve got to wait and see [what happens].”
Kumar Penn adds that celebrity fans are a nice touch, as well:
“I’ve had the blessing of working on things like The Namesake and Superman Returns and How I Met Your Mother and I love those types of things and I’m always amazed to know who has seen the Harold and Kumar movies and why… John [Cho, who plays Harold] and I were talking and we heard that Quentin Tarantino was a fan of the franchise. We had a chance to meet him a couple years ago and we were just floored that that was the case. You never really know.”
Have you seen the new Harold Kumar film? Did it measure up to the epic first installment?
