Ryland Brickson Cole Tews is the creator of the cult smash Hundreds of Beavers, a bonkers film that can be boiled down to a man fighting hundreds of beavers (or people in very obvious beaver costumes), but somehow contains so much more. The film has stood out through its touring model, where Tews presents the film at cinemas around the world. He is currently touring the film in the UK for the second time with multiple Greater Manchester dates coming soon. I was lucky enough to sit down with him and chat beavers.
We started off talking about how he got into filmmaking. “I started making movies from a very young age,” he tells me. “Mostly it was just silly home movies or making movies for projects at school, whenever the teacher said, okay, you have to do a class project, I always wanted to make it into a movie of some sort. And those were fun because they were always very silly and funny, and they usually weren’t that related to the source material. But I always got good grades on them because I think the teachers were like, wow, they really went above and beyond to make this movie. Even though it had little to do with Taoism or The Odyssey or whatever.”
I told him I would have loved to see his adaptation of The Odyssey knowing how absurd his films turned out to be. “I hope Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey movie is just with beavers,” he jokes. “Just all these A-listers, but in beaver costumes. And Christopher Nolan’s like, no, I assure you, that’s really Matt Damon in that costume.”
Tews kept making films all the way through school, meeting the director of Hundreds of Beavers, Mike Cheslick, where they made promotional films for their high school and kept working together until they were making feature films on micro-budgets.
We then move onto the subject of Hundreds of Beavers itself. “The concept for the movie started as all great ideas do, in a bar,” Tews says. He explained that, naturally, “We wanted to make a wintertime movie and we wanted it to still be pretty small scale, pretty self-contained, with snowball fights and sled chases and whatnot. And we wanted all the animals to be played by humans and mascot costumes.” Although it began with the idea of people in animal costumes falling over and getting into scraps (a “universal language” as Tews puts it), “once we started writing, as these things often happen with us, we just got scope creep, and the thing just grew and grew and grew out of proportion into the epic monstrosity you see today.”
The mixture of references the film pulls from are equally odd, “obviously the silent movies of yesteryear and 30s cartoons, and we like America’s Funniest Home Videos, oh, and Jackass.” The film does indeed feel like a mixture of Buster Keaton and Johnny Knoxville in the best way possible, although perhaps leaning a bit less in the Jackass direction and more in the realms of the era of silent slapstick.
For the Hundreds of Beavers guys this was the way of separating the film from the mass of indie films that come out all the time. “We thought the answer would be to make a no dialogue, slapstick, physical comedy with mascots, cheap effects, make it black and white. We just wanted to have all these elements where by the end of it, people would be like, wow, what was this thing? Is this even a real movie?”
While it helped the film stand out, Tews spoke about how it didn’t actually lead to success at being screened at festivals and picking up distribution. This is what eventually led to the model of the touring film that meant Beavers had so much success. “We said, if you show our movie, we’ll show up with a bunch of beaver boys dressed in mascot costumes and we’ll do different crazy antics and stuff. I mean, I used to do like WWE style wrestling body slams and stuff on these beavers…So it was more than just the movie. It became like, oh, what are these crazy guys going to do next? Sort of like a Rocky Horror Picture Show where you’re eventizing the screening.”
They then never got a traditional distribution deal, taking the film more into the hands of its creators. “We hired our own theatrical booker. So instead of getting a distributor to put the movie in like a few theatres, we said, no, let’s just hire our own theatrical booker and they’ll put the movie in as many theatres as will take the movie. And that’s why the movie started its theatrical run in January 2024, and in September 2025. And I’m doing my third tour this year with Beavers because we have the theatrical rights so we can just book whatever theatre we want. And because of this the movie, which costs something like 150,000 USD, has now grossed 1.3 million worldwide; just because we didn’t settle on a distributor. We just said, no, we’re going to do it ourselves.”
It is a remarkable achievement that so many people have turned out to see the film in a time where even the biggest studios are facing consistently lowering ticket sales – even Francis Ford Coppola has tried the touring model recently to little fanfare. This is Tews’ second tour of the UK and Ireland, the first lasting almost four months across 45 screenings, as well as an extensive German tour, where, Tews tells me, the box office numbers are even higher than in the UK.
The humour of the film is very easily translatable, in that there isn’t anything to translate. We talk about if different jokes land differently in different places to which Tews can only really give one example, a moment in the film where he steps barefoot in the snow. “People who are from more cold weather climates see that shot and they go crazy,” but show the film in places where snow doesn’t fall, audiences are unphased: “What’s the big deal? I don’t understand. Is that a joke?” It’s a rare part of the film that isn’t at all geographically locked.
Without me even fishing for it, Tews tells me that his favourite place in the UK he’s toured the film is Manchester, specifically Cultplex. “All three were sold out and it’s like a smaller venue and it’s kind of hip, it’s like a hip punk rock venue. So it was a lot of fun. So I’m very much looking forward to being back.”
Towards the end of our time, talk turned to the prospect of his next film, a DB Cooper biopic of sorts for which the public crowdfunding has just launched. He reeled off the elevator pitch for the movie, “Who was DB Cooper? Where did he come from? Where did he go? Why did he need this money? in a highly embellished action adventure mystery horror romance.” He also tells me the script is “insane.” I’d expect nothing less given his output thus far.
We ended the chat with a few quickfire questions about Hundreds of Beavers:
Q: How many people were in suits at any one time? (A question I assure makes sense if you’ve seen the film.)
A: “The most we had at one time was during the skinning room scene, and that’s when we had five guys in Beaver costumes. Even when I’m getting chased by hundreds of beavers, it’s only like three guys in costumes and then we just duplicated them over and over and over and over again.”
Q) Where did you get the fluffy organs from? (Again, a question that makes sense with context.)
A: “Those fluffy organs were created by Brandon Kirkham, who also created my giant raccoon hat and created the puppets and was also the puppeteer for the puppet. So yes, Brandon Kirkham made those plushy, cute organs.”
Q: Do you know off the top of your head how many beavers you kill in the movie?
A: “I don’t know. We’ve never sat down and counted. But I think there is actually a YouTube video that someone did and they found the kill count was, I think, a little over 1000. I think it was like 1,113 or something. So my body count is pretty high.”
Those only scratch the surface of how insane Hundreds of Beavers gets. The longer it goes on the crazier it gets, in what I think is a genuinely impressive display of pacing and ramping up. Bolstered by how much I enjoyed our talk, I told Tews I would hope to see one of the Manchester shows on his tour. He replied, “Well, I’ll try not to disappoint you horribly.”
Hundreds of Beavers will be playing with Ryland in attendance at The Light Stockport 5th October, Home Cinema 6th October and Cultplex 15th October.
