Roughly half the money for every Asylum film budget comes from international sales—Europe, China, the Middle East—and those happen at the American Film Market. It's where independent producers like The Asylum gather to unload product on distributors from every country on earth. Silent but Deadly! Right now it's October , five months before Atlantic Rim even starts filming, and it's here that The Asylum will sell the international rights to the mockbuster to guys like Gerald Scheffer, a candid, middle-aged buyer from Holland.
Sitting across from Rimawi and Bales in their suite, he says, "We have a problem," his thick Flemish accent making the statement sound even more ominous. Scheffer, one of The Asylum's key European distributors, has bought scores of titles from the studio over the years, and now he's playing hardball. He's heard it before. Scheffer is his sixtieth meeting this week, including ten with Chinese buyers. This is one of the first acting roles for female lead Jackie Moore, an ex—lingerie model: "I keep asking for more makeup and less clothing, and they give me less makeup and more clothing.
Scheffer flips through the Asylum catalog, pausing on Atlantic Rim. Right below the movie's tagline—"Aliens Invade! Mankind Fights Back! Pacific Rim. Even though Atlantic Rim needs to be shot in four months and released in eight, at this moment there is no script, no writer, no director. It's these CGI creations that get mentioned most in those one-star reviews.
While the real-deal Battleship had more than digital modelers, animators, and renderers working on its still lame alien invaders, The Asylum's entire visual effects team consists of fifteen people in two cramped rooms, and they're usually working on six movies at once. So perhaps the fairest way to put it is this: The aliens in American Warships might have blown away theatrical audiences ten years ago. From certain angles, anyway.
After all of his nitpicking, it's clear Scheffer was just looking for some negotiating leverage. He ends up buying nineteen Asylum films, including Nazi movies, zombie movies, and a movie in which the Nazis turn into zombies.
God bless Amsterdam. He also buys all of The Asylum's mockbusters, including Atlantic Rim. Five months later, the cast and crew in Pensacola wrap their final weekend of shooting.
This morning is an unseasonably cold fifty-six degrees. The upside is that the public beach where the second unit is shooting a battle scene is deserted.
The downside is that of the twenty extras who RSVP'd—most learned about the gig on Craigslist—only ten have shown up. And the guys who did aren't Seal Team 6. One soldier looks to be about 65 years old. A retired combat officer keeps reminding the guys how to be somewhat realistic fake grunts. Don't point your gun at anyone in front of you! You're killing your own men! What this scrappy fighting force could use is Ken Cosentino's Big-Ass Gun, and the plan was to bring it out this morning.
But a producer says that's not going to happen after all. If we brought it out now, we'd be swarmed. When mockbusting, the last thing The Asylum needs is more legal trouble. The major studios and their trademark-protection lawyers tolerated mockbusters until last year, when Universal sued The Asylum over its Battleship knockoff.
The two parties settled out of court after The Asylum agreed to change the movie's title from American Battleship to American Warships. Partner Paul Bales regrets the settlement. Let's hire the same attorneys and go after them for everything,'" he says. This past December, Warner Bros. That's what happens when you have the cojones to release a movie with the word "hobbits" in the title.
Warner Bros. The Asylum insists the term hobbit is fair use, because it's also the scientific nickname of a three-foot-tall human skeleton discovered by archaeologists in I don't have anything against the studio protecting the term hobbit, or else you're going to have hobbit candy bars and hobbit movies.
So far, the courts have sided with Warner Bros. Last winter a federal judge issued an injunction against Age of the Hobbits, forcing The Asylum to change the title to Clash of the Empires not to be confused with Clash of the Titans. The Asylum plans to appeal the ruling, setting up a legal battle that could cost more than the pygmy-centric film itself.
But the mockbuster makers aren't backing down. It certainly wasn't my original intent to do this, but I love making movies. Hopefully you can understand that passion and don't want to punch me in the face. But if you do want to punch me in the face, I'll give you a free shot. About two months after filming on Atlantic Rim wraps, I screen a nearly completed version of the film.
Sure, it has plenty in common with the other Asylum movies I've watched, from a generic thumping soundtrack to some groan-inducing dialogue. Yes, the tone, plot, and pacing make a Michael Bay movie look like a quiet character study. But from sitting on the sidelines of the film's shoot, I could see that there's an art to Atlantic Rim.
It's in the ingenuity and craftiness born out of tight-budgeted necessity: the way Cohn and company cut together footage from a Pensacola parade to make it look like they had thousands of extras on hand, or the unexpectedly convincing robot cockpits that had been shot in a rented hotel room with only flat-screen TVs as a backdrop.
Community-theater-level acting is inevitable when half the supporting staff comes from Pensacola community theater, but Treach manages to sell some hokey lines. It was also the successor to a massively successful multimedia empire, which meant, of course, that The Asylum decided once again to try and make people think they were responsible for a worldwide blockbuster, titling their bizarre amalgamation of fantasy elements Age of the Hobbits.
The title's use of the word "hobbit" led to the film being prevented from release it was eventually retitled Clash of the Empires , going straight-to-DVD in March , although The Asylum argued that the film was "about a real-life human subspecies commonly known as hobbits," and thus did not infringe on the similarly-titled blockbuster's copyright. It should be obvious at this point that the signature studio of mockbusters will get as close as they can to copyright infringement in terms of titles, at least without actually breaking the law most of the time - remember Age of the Hobbits?
Anyway, considering the success of The Asylum's terrifyingly bad Transmorphers , Hornet was an obvious follow-up, spitting on what was possibly the most sacred and critically successful of all the films in the Transformers franchise, Bumblebee. The film focuses on the strangely familiar Hornet, a robot who must save humanity after we're all brainwashed by alien creatures - and at least we can say it's not nearly as bad as some of the more putrid rip-offs The Asylum has put out, as we've become used to pointless, terrible B-movies by now - Hornet just doesn't expand on its terribleness enough to embrace its true, heinous, nature as an Asylum film.
Finding Nemo was a groundbreaking computer-animated film, and one of the first to feature the sea as its primary setting, so obviously it became the target of quite a few mockbusters - but The Asylum was merciful with Pixar's masterpiece - that is, until Finding Dory came out.
At that point, The Asylum's overpaid executives released their wretched wrath upon one of cinema's most beloved creations, devising the animated atrocity granted the name of Izzie's Way Home. One look at the title should tell you everything you need to know about The Asylum's terrible, treacherous filmmaking pattern - burning your soul and poisoning your mind with its utter lack of any shape, form, or beauty. While these incredibly stupid rip-offs can be fun to joke about, it's also heartbreakingly sad to consider that they continue to be commercially successful, and we shudder for those who are "gifted" these blighting blemishes upon filmmaking as an art instead of their less dreadful and much more original cinematic counterparts.
Izak Bulten is an amateur film historian and Wikipedia addict who spends hours ingesting random facts in the hope he'll be able to use them in conversation at some point. In his free time, he enjoys animating, playing board games, and grappling with the occasional existential crisis.
By Izak Bulten Published Dec 25, It has a lot to do with requests we get from our buyers. We submit our ideas to them, and according to their current needs, we choose which film to go after. Is there a direct link between the success of the original film to the mockbuster?
As strange as it seems, it does turn out to be a direct relation between the success of the film to its mockbuster. The company success led to its expansion into other markets. Today, along these films, they also produce films for the Sci-Fi channel, as well as for the Christian-religious market. I found out only hours before the shoot, when given the script.
With all humor involved, not everyone is happy with the mockbusters phenomena. The web is filled with complaints of customers who wanted the original film, only to found out they rented the cheap version.
0コメント