Coding the Wheel

Movie Doppelgangers: B-Movie Ripoffs of Hollywood Blockbusters

Friday, August 05, 2011

[Skip to the Movie Doppelgängers poster.]

Well, another $5 down the drain. The other night I stopped by Blockbuster to rent a copy of Battle: Los Angeles. Blockbuster is a bit of a ghost town these days, the sort of place that makes you think:

Huh, wonder what my first move would be if the undead attacked, right here, right now.

I was in a hurry and I kept imagining the clerk would morph into a zombie and I'd be forced to defend myself with stacks of $5 previously-owned titles from the bargain bin. So in my haste/nervousness I ended up grabbing a copy of what looked like Battle: Los Angeles, but was in fact Battle OF Los Angeles. Silly me.

This isn't the first time I've been burned by a movie doppelgänger posing as a legitimate flick, and I watch movies all the time. Anybody with a Netflix Instant subscription knows there's an entire sidepocket genre of crappy movies disguised to resemble the familiar blockbusters you know and love, whose only purpose is to, uh, resemble the familiar blockbusters you know and love. These mockbusters won't fool horror buffs or sci-fi geeks, but clearly they fool somebody; at least one company has made a business of producing mockbusters and nothing else.

The Asylum was founded by former Village Roadshow executives David Rimawi, Sherri Strain, and director David Michael Latt in 1997. The company focused on producing straight-to-video low-budget films, usually in the horror genre, but were unable to find a market due to competition from major studios, such as Lions Gate Entertainment. In 2005, the company produced a low-budget adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, which was released in the same year as Steven Spielberg's adaptation of the same material. Blockbuster Inc. ordered 100,000 copies of The Asylum's adaptation, a significantly larger order than any of the company's previous releases, resulting in Latt and Rimawi reconsidering their business model.

In the years since the War of the Worlds debacle, The Asylum has been busy producing low-rent knockoffs of everything from High School Musical to the Da Vinci Code. Very, very busy. So busy I had to knock the cobwebs off my copy of Photoshop and make a poster juxtaposing each Hollywood blockbuster with its Asylum-produced mockbuster.

It's a bit of a jumbled mess right now because I guess I'm not capable of thinking about Hollywood without snarling about the scapegoating of P2P filesharing or the poisoning of the digital commons by groups like the MPAA, RIAA, and MPEG-LA. But I think you'll be surprised at just how many of these little buggers there are in the world. (Mockbusters, not annoying industry consortiums with acronymous names. Well, both.)

Tags: horror, movies, sci-fi

13 comment(s)

Hate to burst your bubble but Justin Bieber vs Spongebob Squarepants would be a pretty awesome movie.

Anonymous Coward on Saturday, August 06, 2011

Got fooled some years ago by War of the Worlds, there was actually a feature article in Wired about these guys a while ago if you want to listen to them justify their existence.

Ron on Saturday, August 06, 2011

"This doesn’t mean the Asylum can simply coast by on gilded reptiles and optically enhanced boobs. Because its films have minimal marketing, almost no theatrical footprint, and few bankable names, the studio makes most of its money from the people who wander the new-release wall at 11:45 on Friday night. “What sells our films is the fact that you’ve got a DVD box with some cool art, and it’s sitting right next to the studio movies,” Asylum partner Paul Bales says. “We’ve always been in the pretty-box business.”

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_the_asylum/

Anonymous Coward on Saturday, August 06, 2011

Tied for the Most Evil Company in Hollywood with Universal, Time/Warner, New Line Cinema, ...

Ed K. on Monday, August 08, 2011

Battle: Los Angeles is bad though. You didn't really miss much.

Anonymous Coward on Monday, August 08, 2011

Supply a printable version of the poster or the bunny gets it

Stacy on Sunday, August 14, 2011

Netflix Instant is rotten with this tripe. They use B titles to stuff their movie lists to make it seem like they have more and better movies than they do.

F.C. Delaney on Wednesday, August 31, 2011

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skjahirul on Thursday, November 24, 2011

Haha.. what next - Lord Of The Ring?? canvas art

jay on Friday, November 25, 2011

for a few minutes. When Putnam came up to his party he said "we drive them." Now let it be

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Arizona Web on Saturday, January 21, 2012

Battle: LA was a great movie (the new one that is). I have noticed a lot of very similar movies, mostly ones dealing with martial arts. I watched old martial arts movies so often that it made me want to join the local Indianapolis Jiu Jitsu academy where I live. I did and love it!

Bradly on Wednesday, January 25, 2012

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kash on Wednesday, February 08, 2012

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