If there’s an important lesson to be learned from cult TV-movie franchise “Sharknado,” it’s not that you can cut your way out of a shark with a chainsaw – it’s that you don’t need to spend big to end up swimming in profits.
Burbank production company Asylum continues to generate lucrative licensing deals, foreign sales – to 86 countries – and other revenue, all from its cheaply made and deliberately absurd disaster sagas.
With the latest installment, “Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!,” set to debut on NBCUniversal-owned cable channel Syfy this week, the massive media interest around the July 22 premiere – the film made the cover of TV Guide – suggests these B movies with D-list casts rate an A in terms of return on investment.
“We made a crazy little movie we just thought a bunch of stoners would think was great,” said Anthony Ferrante, who has directed all three “mockbusters.” “Now, two years later, we’re a marketing machine and a huge franchise. The whole experience is surreal.”
Surreal in no small part because, while the “Sharknado” franchise is now a huge phenomenon that generates big ratings for Syfy and huge buzz on social media, Asylum continues to closely follow the formula used for the first film: All three are about a tornado scooping up sharks and unleashing them on different cities, and each has been shot in just 18 days – with a budget of reportedly less than $2 million apiece.
That’s peanuts in an age when a single network TV pilot typically costs $10 million.
Cheap, cheerful
But the healthy ratings for previous installments – about 4 million viewers tuned in for last year’s premier of “Sharknado 2: The Second One,” roughly triple the typically audience for one of Syfy’s made-for-TV movies – and the buzz around “Sharknado 3” suggests that an audience saturated with big-budget tent-pole films also enjoys the firm’s cheap and cheerful approach.
Asylum, founded in 1997, started out as a distributor and then moved into the production of low-budget horror, action and sci-fi films. Now it finances and produces more than 20 films a year, around half of which are sold to Syfy. Its films usually star past-their-prime celebrities, such as 1980s pop stars Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, who appeared in 2011’s “Mega Python vs Gatoroid.”
Asylum executives declined to comment for this story.
Asylum isn’t the only firm that has found success producing B movies on a shoestring. It’s a long-established Hollywood template stretching back to the likes of cheesy 1958 monster movie “The Blob” – Steve McQueen’s first leading role – which was made for $110,000 and ended up making $4 million. The same low-budget approach has been used by horror movies for decades.
Still, movie makers say the wild success of Asylum’s shark tale is a useful reminder that you don’t always have to speculate to accumulate.
“Audiences still want escapism and to be able to laugh and be scared. Give the audience what it wants and expects and you’ll be successful,” said Joseph Weisman, development director at Hollywood’s Cinetel Films Inc., which is hoping for “Sharknado”-style success with its own upcoming Syfy movie, “Lavalantula,” about a volcanic eruption in Los Angeles that unleashes giant spiders on the city.
“Sharknado” director Ferrante agrees it’s about giving the customers what they want.
“The major studios spend all that marketing money telling you to watch this movie or another but this was a case of the audience coming to us,” he said.
The original “Sharknado” came out of nowhere in 2013 to become a Twitter sensation with an unprecedented 5,000 tweets per minute at one point during the broadcast, with everyone from Mia Farrow to the Red Cross posting about its cheesy appeal. While Nielsen ratings showed that original airing drew only 1.4 million viewers, only slightly above typical numbers for a TV movie on Syfy, it was swiftly repeated five times due to audience demand on social media, pushing total viewership to 14 million.
So when “Sharknado 2” hit the scene last summer, it not only brought in 4 million viewers, but also lured big sponsors, including Dell, Jack in the Box, Haines and Geico, for promotional tie-ins.
Expect more of those tie-ins in the new film. In a statement announcing San Francisco beauty brand Benefit Cosmetics as a sponsor of “Sharknado 3,” Alison Tarrant, NBCUniversal’s executive vice president, called the film franchise “an unmatched marketing platform for advertisers, combining the enormous power of television with unparalleled social amplification.”
Aiming bigger
The new film, debuting this week, will feature more than just new promotional sponsors. This time around, Syfy has built a whole week of programming around the broadcast with specially commissioned – and equally preposterous – movies such as “Roboshark,” “Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf” and “Zombie Shark.”
Making cameo appearances in “Sharknado 3” are “Shark Tank” investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban as the president of the United States and conservative political commentator Ann Coulter as the vice president.
Also popping up are David Hasselhoff and Bo Derek. (Former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle’s filmed cameo was cut from the movie after his house was raided as part of an FBI child pornography investigation.)
The film’s returning stars, as shark-fighting couple Fin and April, are former “Beverly Hills 90210” actor Ian Ziering and “American Pie” actress Tara Reid, whose struggling careers have rebounded thanks to the improbable hit.
When Ziering, 51, calls his role “life altering,” he’s not joking. Acting work had dried up since his days as curly haired jock Steve Sanders on “90210,” and he had been working as a Chippendales dancer in Las Vegas. He said he only took the part in the original “Sharknado” because his wife was pregnant and he needed a TV job to retain his Screen Actors Guild health insurance.
“Now I’m part of a momentous success that stretches far beyond our borders,” he told the Business Journal. “It’s wonderful.”
Reid, 39, who had become better known for appearing in tabloids than in films, is seeking to cash in on the popularity of her current role, having launched her own perfume, Shark by Tara.
