“Splitsville” wasn’t necessarily an easy film to make, and that’s partly because filmmakers Michael Angelo Covino (who directed, starred, and wrote the movie) and Kyle Marvin (who wrote and acted in the film) had an uphill battle.
While speaking to TheWrap’s Steve Pond during TheWrap’s Cannes Conversations in partnership with Brand Innovators, Covino explained that “anytime” a film is accepted by a festival, “I think it’s good. But then, you know, you’re always sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop sometimes.”
Six years have elapsed between the release of 2019’s “The Climb” and the pair’s newest movie “Splitsville,” which begins with a request for a divorce that sends Marvin’s character to Covino for help and support. Since “The Climb,” they had to contend with the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the lengthy SAG-AFTRA strikes. Covino said they “got close” on a movie or two, and wrote two scripts before specifically attempting to write something that could get made in the current market.
“When we were here with ‘The Climb,’ we made that with a company called Topic Studios, and they financed ‘The Climb,’ and we brought to market and sold it here, we ended up doing a first look deal for three years with them coming off of ‘The Climb.’”
Covino continued: “And so we wrote three scripts, and this was just the third script. So there were two kind of bigger scripts, and movies that we were really excited about making, and still are. And then this one was like, ‘Okay, let’s make something really makeable right now.’ And so we wrote this as sort of something that Kyle and I could act in again, and something that was a bit of a return to what we had done before, which was like a relatively manageable budget.”
Producer Emily Korteweg added that Covino and Marvin wisely set “Splitsville” up to appeal to a wide audience. “I think you did have an awareness of what the market might be looking for and what is, maybe not missing, but where there is an opportunity in the comedic landscape, which means elevated comedy for a global audience,” she said. “So clearly, it came from story first. But you had an awareness of where you wanted to take it.”
Covino also said that since the release of “The Climb” was upended by the pandemic — the film was set to be released in March 2020 — they specifically wanted to set “Splitsville” up with a distributor instead of shopping the completed project.
“We were very intent on not taking this film to market to sell it,” the filmmaker said. “I think the goal was really to go in with a distributor who we could be having conversations about how to market the film, how to release the film, and really just partnering from from Day One. And that’s not because we wouldn’t love to make a film independently and go and sell it for a lot of money someday again, but I think it’s just there’s been so much fluctuation.”
Neon will release “Splitsville” in theaters on Aug. 22, 2025.
Watch the full conversation below.
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