Perhaps the most famous of all indie studios focused on developing rip-offs of popular films (known as “mockbusters”), The Asylum has been around for over twenty years and thus earned a special brand of notoriety within the film community. Granted, they don’t focus only on mockbusters; most notably, they were also responsible for the Sharknado and 2-Headed Shark Attack franchises (anyone noticing a common theme?), as well as the post-apocalyptic horror-comedy series Z Nation - but they’ll always be known first and foremost for their blatant attempts at cashing in on other Hollywood productions.
Whether it’s creating something entirely different, but giving it a similar title, or just making the same movie on a significantly lower budget, here are some of the most laughable examples of The Asylum ripping off Hollywood.
Sunday School Musical (2008) / High School Musical 3 (2008)
High School Musical 3 was the first installment of its popular Disney franchise to be released in theaters, and because of that, it generated a lot of buzz among filmgoers and became a major box office hit. Three days before the film’s theatrical release, a similar film was released directly-to-DVD - The Asylum’s Sunday School Musical, which they produced under their Christian-based division, creatively titled Faith Films.
The mockbuster is laughable regardless of your belief system, and what makes it even funnier is that the creators of the film stole the idea from the host of a seminar they were attending on making faith-based films. Plus, in case you wanted to jam along with the evangelic adolescents, the film includes twenty-one songs, including seven originals! Who wouldn’t be sold after a pitch like that?
Paranormal Entity (2009) / Paranormal Activity (2007)
In 2009, two years after the indie film Paranormal Activity became a surprise box-office hit, The Asylum ripped off the found-footage franchise with their own spin on the haunting horror, aptly titled Paranormal Entity.
While the mockbuster is, like many other Asylum films, more comedically bad than whatever it was trying to be, it was apparently a success (commercially, not critically - nearly every element of the film was panned by reviewers), because much like the Paranormal Activity franchise, it spawned several useless sequels - although the only elements the franchises share are their pseudo-documentary style and plots focusing on invisible supernatural entities.
Transmorphers (2007) / Transformers (2007)
One of the signature elements of mockbusters that leads to them becoming such successful ventures with little marketing is that oblivious shoppers will often buy them instead of whatever blockbuster they intended to buy. And when the titles are as similar as Transmorphers is to Transformers, this exact event becomes surprisingly common - especially if the films’ release windows are in very close proximity to each other.
This blatant rip-off of Michael Bay’s popular sci-fi film about robots that can transform themselves into everyday vehicles became one of The Asylum’s most successful mockbusters yet, leading to extra attention for their studio - which, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, is not exactly a good thing.
Clown (2019) / It: Chapter Two (2019)
While 2019’s Clown isn’t nearly as severe of a rip-off as some of The Asylum’s more obvious mockbusters, that still doesn’t let it off the hook - a good deal of its imagery is ripped from the mega-blockbuster It 2, and their release dates nearly coincided. The story is more confused than confusing, following teens forced to protect themselves against a murderous clown stalking them through a funhouse - already derivative of traditional horror fare without the obvious parallels to the film adaptation of Steven King’s horror classic. The Asylum also released Pet Graveyard this year, again indicating their favorite filmmaking process is throwing together genre tropes and putting a baiting title on the cover - a system that seems to work, for reasons we can only try to grasp.
Snakes on a Train (2006) / Snakes on a Plane (2006)
Snakes on a Plane was all the rage in the time leading up to its release, mostly because of the film’s unusual premise, as well as its Internet marketing techniques - the point is, it was big, and it had all the makings of a cash cow - which naturally led to The Asylum seeing big money in a low-budget knock-off.
But they couldn’t just make the same movie, so to distinguish their film from the one featuring snakes on a plane, The Asylum chose to place the titular snakes on a train instead. Also, to further distance their film from the other, better one, they changed the origin of the snakes - having them spawn inside a cursed woman’s belly and eat their way out - because why not?
The Final Level: Escaping Rancala (2019) / Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)
The Asylum’s newest release, The Final Level: Escaping Rancala came out December 10th and is a hilarious bad rip-off of the newest Jumanji film, following a girl who travels with her two best friends into the world of a video game to save her brother, who has become trapped in the virtual experience.
Honestly, it’s just bad - but with Jumanji: The Next Level enjoying such success, cruising for a spot as one of the biggest blockbusters of 2019, you can’t blame a studio that’s main focus is creating knock-offs for cashing in on the lucrative franchise.
Pirates of Treasure Island (2006) / Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)
The Asylum pulled off a bait-and-switch with Pirates of Treasure Island, a 2006 addition to their infamous collection of terrible mockbusters.
While its marketing and design makes it look nearly identical to Disney’s successful Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, what the film actually gifts audiences with is a rote retelling of Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island combined with additional stylistic and story choices that seem to have been thought up by genuine asylum inmates as opposed to the slightly less deranged minds at The Asylum.
Planet of the Sharks (2016) / Planet of the Apes
In case your idea of entertainment is watching the total denigration of the Planet of the Apes franchise’s legacy, Planet of The Sharks is for you. It sends its unwilling audience on a ride through a world where global warming has left a great deal of the Earth submerged, causing sharks to suddenly have an biological advantage over other lifeforms - they proceed, of course, to one-up the humans on a massive scale - and the humans, in turn, must fight back.
If you didn’t lose brain cells reading the tedious, formulaic plot description, you’ve probably already realized just how terrible this film is - the premise is probably the most endurable part of the whole thing.
Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls (2008) / Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
With Steven Spielberg’s revamp of the Indiana Jones franchise set for a 2008 release, executives at The Asylum were no doubt spit-balling their best rip-off ideas - thankfully, we never got to see the ideas they came up with, since they eventually just settled on just adapting something else and advertising it as kind-of-like-Indiana-Jones.
That something else was King Solomon’s Mines, an 1885 novel the pioneered the “lost world adventure” entertainment genre - and The Asylum’s concerning adaptation is every bit as terrible as we’ve come to expect from them, so much so that it’s basically bearable once you’ve become numb to their mind-numbingly annoying exploitation tactics.
The Avengers Grimm series / The Avengers series / Once Upon a Time
Even Marvel could not hide itself from The Asylum’s deadly gaze - so in 2015 we got Avengers Grimm, a truly terrible mash-up of some of the most popular entertainment at the time - Avengers: Age of Ultron and the TV series Once Upon a Time. It’s remarkably predictable - you’ve probably already realized the experience of viewing the film in its entirety is similar to watching an annoying friend ramble about their poorly written Marvel fanfiction for ninety minutes.
But, the film made money, so by complete coincidence a sequel was released around the same time as Infinity War - aptly titled Time Wars. Oh, and they didn’t limit their ripping-off to Marvel, because they also ripped off DC with Sinister Squad - so, bottom line: Unless you absolutely love awful B-movies, you should never, ever, watch anything The Asylum has created. At all.
