Simon Pegg and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (trailer) director Robert Weide have taken to the nets, urging fans not to buy the DVD.  The situation is sort of complicated (full rundown here), but the gist is that Weide and Pegg worked hard on extra material for the UK release and then got screwed when despite their best efforts, none of made it to the US release.

Weide goes into great detail about what he wanted and what they actually got and why an interview, a snippet of which I’ll include after the jump. But bottom line, he and Pegg say you shouldn’t buy the DVD.  That’s cute you were thinking of us, guys, but honestly, you had me at “starring Kirsten Dunst.”  Anyway, I think It’s clear why the movie failed: not enough animals on the poster.  No bears riding horses? That’s just lazy.

Pegg on what you’re missing out on:

I was very disappointed when I heard about the lack of extra features on the US DVD of How To Lose Friends And Alienate people, particularly when Bob and I went to great lengths to ensure they were available. I, together with Edgar Wright and our team, have always strived to make our DVDs worth buying by loading them with extra content. We even invented never before seen DVD extras such as the Homage-o-meter, the Plot Holes comic strips and the trivia track, such was our desire to make the finished product indispensable. On projects where my responsibility was solely as an actor, I have strived to suggest content and have always been slightly ashamed of the discs that offer little. With HTLF Bob Weide, a man at pains to collaborate and achieve the very best he possibly can, was adamant that we work together to produce a DVD that offered a completist’s overview of the finished piece, having devoured the content on the Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz DVDs respectively. It actually became a catchphrase on set and in the edit when anything went wrong or had to be left out. So many times, I heard Bob invoke the mantra “thank god for DVD extras.”

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Weide: That’s the frustrating thing about this.  It was never a matter of what they could hold or what they could fit or what they clear.  They just blew it.  They just screwed up.  And they admitted to me that they screwed up!  I was so outraged by this that I did an investigation and called all the different parties involved and said, “Tell me, from your understanding, what happened?”  And even told Simon, “It’s Kafka meets the Keystone Cops.”  It was just this domino effect of one mistake snowballing.  It wasn’t anybody making a decision not to use the material.  The irony is that once I discovered what had happened, and had contacted all the parties, all the parties involved in this screw-up (maybe five different entities involved), and each one claimed that they would have liked to included all the bonus material.  It was just sloppiness and apathy.  And the double-irony is that I kept sending out e-mails asking “Do you have everything you need?  Have you cleared everything?  Is there anything I can do to help?”  And I was sending out all these e-mails and making all these phone calls and the reaction was “Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine, everything’s okay,” and until finally I got one very specific e-mail from one of the parties saying “It’s alright, we got everything in hand.”

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Weide: But they were in LA but they were referring to it as an “International Release” so I thought they meant US and UK and so after they took all my suggestions and made this really lovely DVD jacket, they then told me that they were totally different from the U.S. release so I had to hunt down the person responsible for the U.S release.  And after I finally found them I said, “Please send me the artwork right away so I can look at it!”  And it took a couple weeks and finally they sent it and it was the artwork of Simon pouring champagne on Megan and it looks like he’s peeing on her.  Except now they had made it even “funnier” because they had taken off his pants and had him in jockey shorts.

Collider: Hilarious.

Weide:  And they had him wearing a t-shirt with the words “Friends” and “People” with a line through it.  And Simon and I just looked at it and were like “Aw, shit.  They’re at it again.”