## The Film’s Second Life
Roar spent approximately thirty-four years in relative obscurity after its initial 1981 release. It was not available in commercial form in North America, had not received the kind of critical rehabilitation that some forgotten films experience through the attention of critics and film scholars, and existed primarily as a curiosity — a film that people who had heard about its production history wanted to see more than they wanted to see it again after seeing it.
The 2015 Drafthouse Films re-release changed this. Drafthouse Films, the distribution arm associated with the Alamo Drafthouse cinema chain founded by Tim League, rediscovered Roar and gave it a theatrical release in North America — the first such release since the film’s production. The re-release was accompanied by marketing that leaned explicitly into the film’s production history, billing it as “the most dangerous movie ever made.” The tagline acknowledged what decades of obscurity had not entirely erased: that the film’s primary claim on attention was not its narrative qualities but the circumstances of its production.
The re-release found an audience that the original distribution had not reached. In the contemporary media environment of 2015, a film that had genuinely endangered the lives of its cast and crew — that contained documented injuries visible in the footage, that had been made without the kind of safety infrastructure that subsequent productions would require — had a kind of appeal that was not available to it in 1981, when the primary commercial context for such a film was simply whether it was a good adventure-comedy. In 2015, it was a document: a record of what it looked like when a filmmaker decided that the only way to make a film about wild animals was to actually work with wild animals, and what that decision cost.