Theme: Mockbusters

The mockbuster is a term that was coined circa 2006 to describe the films produced by the low-budget company The Asylum. The mockbuster is almost always a low-budget film designed to imitate a big-budget film and is released around the same time or soon after to capitalise on the publicity of the more high-profile film.

In the case of The Asylum, the films are made with soundalike titles designed to resemble those of their big-budget counterpart in the hopes that people scanning a list of available titles will not look too closely. The Asylum also have a popular line in conducting low-budget versions of public domain works whenever a new big-budget adaptation is announced.

While The Asylum has made this into a business model, the idea of doing so predates the coining of the term mockbuster and can be seen to be going back decades before.