The $250,000 'Odyssey': How Mockbusters Keep Low-Budget Cinema Alive

The Asylum's The Odyssey cost $250,000. Christopher Nolan's cost $250 million, and Universal's version has topped $1.6 billion at the box office.

That 1,000-to-1 ratio is the entire logic of the mockbuster, and it explains why the low-budget genre trade turned up at this year's American Film Market with a slate built around ad-supported streaming and budgets that keep shrinking.

What exactly is a mockbuster?

A mockbuster is a cheap, fast film designed to catch the publicity of a much bigger studio picture released near it. The Asylum built its reputation on them — Top Gunner, The Da Vinci Treasure, Jurassic Domination, Alien Disclosure Day, Immortal Combat — plus the cult Sharknado franchise and lurid posters featuring multiple-headed monsters.

Homer's poem complicates the category. Because the text has sat in the public domain for roughly 2,500 years, the title did not need tweaking for copyright reasons, as the Asylum did with its self-aware cash-ins. The Odyssey is not strictly a mockbuster, though the company timed it to ride Universal's wave anyway.

Reception split savagely. One critic wrote, "Dumb, ridiculous, embarrassing, nonsensical." Another said, "Not a single redeeming feature." Others rejoiced in the audacity: one viewer said, "I've never laughed so hard," cheering at a supposed Greek warship that was "nothing more than a little rowboat."

Why did The Asylum make it?

David Rimawi, CEO and co-founder, says the company tracks studio originals closely. "We've said this before, but we've found there's a direct correlation between how well the studio film does and how well ours does. If it's a hit, ours is generally a hit as well." On his own film's fate: "It performed very well."

Co-founder David Latt is already looking forward. "We're very happy with how it turned out. So we're now looking forward to Christopher Nolan's 'Iliad.'"

The company expects the $250,000 film to make back at least more than $250,000. Exact numbers will take months, since platform figures and the splits from complex rent-sharing agreements arrive slowly.

Other recent Asylum mockbusters include The Last Hail M.A.R.Y., a sci-fi with the same Earth-saving theme as Amazon MGM's Project Hail Mary — except that instead of a CGI alien rock creature, Latt says, it is "a dude with some prosthetics" — plus The Mummy, a completely different horror story from Lee Cronin's The Mummy released around the same time, and the zombie copycat Resident Dead. The company notes it chose not to make a low-budget version of Digger.

What changed since the DVD boom?

The physical market collapsed, and it took the spoils with it. In 2005 the Asylum sold around 100,000 DVDs of its $500,000 War of the Worlds — its first and, it claims, mostly coincidental mockbuster — released a day before Paramount's Tom Cruise vehicle. Those DVDs, dressed to resemble major Hollywood releases, lined Walmart shelves.

In its 25th anniversary title 2025 Armageddon, the studio tipped a meta hat to that history with a scene in which a grandmother mistakes one of its DVDs for a studio film.

Today Rimawi describes a "tiny margin world" of digital distribution, reliant on volume and the occasional breakout. Latt puts it plainly: "We actually have to make more to make a little."

Where the money comes from now

Ad-based streaming platforms have filled the gap. "This is where our customers and the Asylum found each other again, and if you're watching the wrong movie, you can gloriously just jump to the next," says Rimawi. "It's the core of our business model now." Tubi, Roku and Pluto TV carry the library, and the Asylum runs its own FAST channel (free, ad-supported streaming television).

Cable-based rental and purchasing shifted largely to Amazon, where "some films can do nothing, but some can be massive hits — that's where our big performances come." Curiously, the Asylum still shifts roughly 10,000 to 20,000 DVDs a year at Walmart. "It's baffling to us," Rimawi says. "I think people just use it like a rental store."

What does this change for smaller producers?

ITN Studios, which has churned out scores of low-budget horrors and action thrillers about clowns, dolls, dinosaurs, scarecrows and sharks, arrived at AFM with Mary Magnum: Jiu-Jitsu Nun — a thriller about a former military sharpshooter who breaks out of a convent to rescue her former lesbian lover. Its Bad Nun franchise launched in 2018, the same year Corin Hardy's supernatural horror The Nun took theaters.

CEO Stuart Alson now distributes across Amazon, Roku, Xumo, Pluto, Peacock, Tubi and YouTube, many under revenue-share agreements. "But it's definitely a lot harder now," he says. "If you're trying to make it or break it on one film at a time, that's what can be challenging. But if you have a slate of films and you're constantly putting films out, some win, some lose."

The library carries the studio. ITN holds more than 1,000 titles, and only a few years ago it was releasing almost 100 a year. Older films have broken even, so any new earnings, however minuscule, "help to keep the lights on."

How low can the budget go?

About five years ago Alson was financing films in the $30,000-and-under range. That microbudget has more than halved. "You've got people making movies for $5,000," he says.

Brit duo Scott Chambers and Rhys Frake-Waterfield, who made ITN's slasher hit Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey — the company's biggest success to date — now focus on their own "Poohniverse," with the third Winnie film in post. They argue the arena where they thrived is dying. "Often the trailer appears instantly, and straight away you can tell," says Chambers, pointing to how instantly available online reviews and IMDb ratings expose a film's scale. A DVD sleeve could disguise a small budget; a streaming trailer cannot. "People are just becoming more savvy," adds Frake-Waterfield. "If it looks too low budget, why would you invest $5 when you could rent, I don't know, 'John Wick'?"

What does this change for emerging filmmakers?

Less than the trade's detractors would like. Chambers and Frake-Waterfield note that this is where emerging directors learn their craft, as they did. So the practical question is what happens to $5,000 films, the training ground and the entry point to a slasher franchise, when the shelf that hid the budget and the audience that bought on the packaging both vanish? Streaming visibility and saturation have turned cheap genre production into a volume business, and volume requires a slate.

The Asylum's answer is audacious: buy the public domain, match the marketing, and wait for the next trailer. Whether that strategy survives a shrinking number of screens remains an open question the company will answer with Iliad.