“Well, it didn’t go that well.”

That was Nigel Agnew’s reluctant answer to the response to Good Canadian Cinema?, the week dedicated to just that at indie film house Toronto Underground Cinema.

“I guess people’s mouths are bigger than their wallets or their time,” Agnew tells Playback Daily. “It doesn’t seem they care about what they consider to be good Canadian English cinema.”

The director of operations for TUC had fair reason to think so. Using the power of social media, Agnew and co. drew responses from a thousand film-loving folks who took the time to weigh in on their favorites, and the top six were selected to play on the big screen.

Among the hand-picked films was Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, which kicked off the double-bill program paired with Don McKellar’s Last Night. But the turnout was “atrocious” as Agnew recalls and the following nights showing Porky’s, Cube, Naked Lunch and Brain Candy weren’t much better.

Things began looking up the night of the special Pontypool (pictured) screening, notes Agnew. But it attracted a larger crowd because it was publicized as more of an event with screenwriter Tony Burgess and actor Stephen McHattie in attendance for a Q&A.

Though Good Canadian Cinema? stirred up quite a bit of consumer press, Agnew says it’s not likely that a second edition will happen in the near future, as it wasn’t cost-effective for the TUC to put on such an event when the turnout was so low.

But if the cinema decided to do it again, it would most certainly be open to discussions with partners and sponsors.

Agnew had hoped to be proven wrong at the end of the experiment. “In this one instance, I don’t like to have been right,” he says.