Tiptoes goes viral as Matthew McConaughey fans unearth bizarre movie

It’s the little things in life that matter – for example, the sheer joy Matthew McConaughey got from watching the trailer for Tiptoes for the first time.

McConaughey’s career shifted with 2011’s Killer Joe, reframing him as a formidable, intimidating, and debonair actor. This teed up superb roles in Magic Mike and The Wolf of Wall Street, as well as lead parts in Mud, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, and Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen movie.

However, before 2010, his filmography was wild. He was a bona fide rom-com star, appearing in the likes of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Failure to Launch, and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. There’s also a few bizarre credits you’ve probably forgotten, like Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, Reign of Fire, and Tropic Thunder.

One film stands above the rest on the WTF scale: Tiptoes, Matthew Bright’s infamous 2003 turkey about an average-sized man (McConaughey) who has a secret: everyone else in his family, including his twin brother (Gary Oldman) are dwarfs.

How to watch Tiptoes

Tiptoes is available to stream via Prime Video right now, so if you have a subscription you can watch it for free.

It’s also available on The Roku Channel, Pluto TV, and Freevee, but if you really can’t tolerate ads, you can spend a few bucks and buy or rent it digitally from Amazon and other on-demand providers.

So, what the hell is Tiptoes?

Reality Check Productions

Bright came up with the idea for Tiptoes when he was 18, describing it as a “raucous comedy about little people f**king each other.”

The film predominantly follows Steven (McConaughey) after he meets Carol (Kate Beckinsale). They fall in love, and soon enough, she’s pregnant. However, there’s something she doesn’t know: his whole family are dwarfs, meaning their child could be a dwarf too because he carries the gene. “She doesn’t know I’m the biggie in the family,” McConaughey explained.

Oldman plays his twin brother Rolfe, while Peter Dinklage plays Rolfe’s friend Maurice and Patricia Arquette plays Maurice’s girlfriend Lucy.

During an appearance on the 2 Bears, 1 Cave podcast, McConaughey watched the movie’s trailer for the first time, and after crying with laughter, he spoke about how such a crazy film came to fruition at all.

“It doesn’t look real, but damn that’s a good trailer. That goes for it,” he said.

“It was obviously a wild concept, you see the talent it drew. It was anarchic, it still had some heart to it… we knew it was a soap opera, but it was so carny. I was just like, ‘This is bringing together two worlds: high comedy, but if we straight-face this, it could be really funny and also make you drop a tear.'”

Unfortunately for Bright and co., the movie was ripped apart by critics, with some branding it one of the worst films ever made. However, there’s something you should know: the 90-minute version that’s available on streaming isn’t the original version of the movie.

Tiptoes’ director’s cut premiered at the Butt-Numb-a-Thon festival in 2003. It was 150 minutes long, and Dinklage described it as “gorgeous.”

In the wake of the screening, Bright was fired from the project. It was then re-edited and compressed into a 90-minute feature, which the filmmaker has disavowed. It currently has a 22% score on Rotten Tomatoes, but there’s still hope that the ‘real’ version of the movie will be released sometime in the future.

In the meantime, check out other new movies you can watch this month and our list of the best movies of 2024 so far.