[Answered ]-Django throws 404 at generic views

You forgot the backslashes in your regexes:

(r'events/(?P<year>\d{4})/(?P<month>[a-z]{3})/(?P<day>\w{1,2})/(?P<slug>[-\w]+)/$'

Also you’ve (correctly) got the URL regex ending with a slash, so your URL should be /events/2010/may/12/this-is-a-slug/.

Check the template_name once again.