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Behind ‘Sharknado 2’ and the Science of Low-Budget Hits
ALSO: The King of the B-Movies Still Reigns
INSIDE
Q&A: Al Franken
Gets Serious
plus
Verizon’s Speed Upgrade
Rattles Cable Ops
Arris Makes OTT Pitch
To Independent Ops
Diversity Groups Come Out
Against Title II Rules
coverstory
Shark & Awe
Behind the campaign to find gold in a sea of schlock By MIKE FARRELL
S
yfy is about to debut the sequel to a movie
whose anticipated success is about as baffling
as the premise of the story it tells: how a freak
weather pattern brings live sharks raining
down into the streets of Manhattan.
In the next four days Syfy will find out if lightning
indeed strikes twice (and can take a bigger bite out of
the ratings and social-media universe) with the debut of
Sharknado 2: The Second One (July 30), as well as film legend Roger Corman’s latest hybrid aquatic monster epic,
Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda (Aug. 2).
As scores of young males — the target demo for these
types of low-budget
horror f licks — butTAKEAWAY
ter their popcorn for a
B-movies are making a
night of pure escapist
comeback among basic-cable
fun, other channels and
networks looking for low-cost,
social-media friendly content.
producers are watching closely. Because the
schlocky, tongue-in-cheek, youth-oriented low-budget flicks
that were so popular in the 1960s and 1970s from producers and directors like Corman are making a comeback. And
other networks are looking to jump in the water.
B-MOVIE REVIVAL
Already producers like The Asylum — which produced
Sharknado, Sharknado 2 and dozens of other films for Syfy —
as well as Corman’s New Horizons Picture Corp. and Active
Entertainment, a Louisiana producer that has spawned
Arachnoquake, Swamp Shark and Ghost Shark, among
others, have seen a spike in interest from other networks,
especially those that are going after a young male audience.
“Sharknado got us a lot of meetings,” said The Asylum
partner, sales and distribution David Rimawi, and led to
a deal with Animal Planet for Blood Lake, a reality-based
movie about killer lampreys. “Other networks are saying,
‘Look, we want a film that the audience is excited about
and is talking about.’ Are we signing deals? No. Are we
having conversations? Yes.”
RBC Capital markets media analyst David Bank said that
all networks, large and small, are increasing their focus on
owning more of the content on their channels. And the lowbudget horror movie could more than fit the bill.
“We live in a world where content is more monetizable on
a global basis and that genre [low-budget horror] probably
works across the globe, as opposed to, say, romantic comedies,” Bank said.
While so-called B-movies have been around since the
1930s — they were essentially second reels in double features — they were transformed in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s,
as Corman and a growing number of young producers and
directors tapped into youth culture with low-budget films
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Ian Ziering battles sea creatures on the New York Subway in Sharknado 2: The Second One.
that were high on gore and campy humor like A Bucket of
Blood, Little Shop of Horrors and Attack of the Giant Leeches.
By the ’80s and ’90s, these films made the transition from
the big screen to home video, where they found a new audience attracted to a steady stream of blood, guts and increasingly implausible titles. Corman ushered in the era of the
reptilian monster mash-up with Dinocroc, a half-dinosaur/
half-crocodile creature feature that was snapped up by
fledgling cable network Sci-Fi Channel (as it was then called)
and quickly became its highest-rated movie at the time.
The game changed again with last July’s debut of Sharknado, which on the surface appeared to be just another in a
long line of campy, teen-oriented horror flicks.
But Sharknado (and hopefully its sequel) set off a socialmedia firestorm when it premiered on July 11, 2013, generating more than 387,000 online comments during its initial
87-minute broadcast, mostly on Twitter. While the ratings
for the first Sharknado airing were ordinary — about 1.37
million viewers, a slight improvement over a typical Thursday for the channel — those tweets (reaching about 5,000
per minute at their peak) helped drive more viewers to subsequent airings.
In its second airing, Sharknado drew 1.9 million
| m u l t i c h a n n e l n e w s | j u l y 2 8 , 2 0 1 4 | multichannel.com
viewers and by its third, 2.4 million watched the movie, a record for a Syfy encore. In one fell swoop, Sharknado had proven what online experts have been saying
all along: Social media can drive future ratings.
Syfy executive vice president of marketing digital and
global brand strategy Michael Engleman added that while
the Twitter explosion during the first Sharknado movie was
a surprise, his team knew exactly what to do to keep it going.
SOCIAL SURGE
“When we saw it happening we certainly were pouring fuel
on the fire,” he said. “And we reacted very quickly to that. We
have both a philosophy and an operational ability to immediately, not just old-school, have a one-way conversation,
but to have a two-way conversation, listen to what the fans
are saying, understand the tone and immediately respond.”
The next task for Engleman’s team was to keep the Sharknado engine humming — the sequel was green-lighted just
days after the first airing and a third movie is in the works
for next year. “You don’t want to overplay success and you
don’t want to be heavy-handed, but in a social and digital
world, it’s smart to always keep the conversation going at
some level,” he said.
SYFY
For Syfy, that became a Twitter naming contest for the
second movie [Sharknado 2: The Second One beat out other
fan candidates like Sharknado 2: Sharkalanche, Sharknado 2: Maimed in Manhattan and Sharknado 2: Global
Swarming]. Add to the mix Halloween costume contests,
viewing-party kits and late-night theater showings. Later,
a book (How to Survive a Sharknado and Other Unnatural
Disasters) and a video game were released a few weeks
prior to the July 30 premiere.
Thomas Vitale, executive vice president of original
movies for Syfy and its sister network Chiller, is the man
largely responsible for the resurgence of the low-budget
horror movie on cable, buying inexpensive movies targeting young males for the network as far back as the 1990s.
But while Syfy reaped some pretty good ratings from direct-to-video fare like Dinocroc,
Vitale took the genre to the next level.
“We realized we could make them better
ourselves, if we take some of these independent film companies and tell them, ‘What if
we commissioned these movies, developed
the scripts with you, got involved in the
casting?’ ” Vitale said. “We started doing that
and experimented with a few. Eventually,
we were doing two a month or about 24 a
year. Now we’re over 300 movies later and
we’re still going strong.”
Budgets for the films usually range
from $1.5 million to $2 million per picture, Vitale said, with Syfy kicking in
half that amount. That compares to major studio blockbusters with budgets that
average well over $100 million.
Shooting schedules are tight — they usually wrap up in 18 to 20 days — and the time
from initial concept to finished product is
about 14 months.
For the studios, a close eye on budgets
and production schedules has translated
into a tidy profit. Corman, who has made
more than 400 films over a career that has
spanned more than 50 years (see Q&A, page
14), has lost money on less than a handful
of those pictures. Taking a page from the
Corman playbook, The Asylum targets a profit of at least
$100,000 per picture before it shoots a foot of film. Spread
out over at least 24 films a year — and released via different distribution media, which also adds to the coffers over
time — it can add up to a tidy sum for the small producer. “
“We’re risk-averse,” The Asylum partner, administration
and operations Paul Bales said. “I think we know that if we
really wanted to become giants, we would take a big risk
and spend all of our money on a giant action film with the
latest action hero. But in many [cases] that doesn’t work
out all of the time. We like our model of working within
the budgets that we have.”
But even when each dollar is accounted for, there are
things beyond the producers’ control. Asylum partner, production David Michael Latt, who directed the company’s
first film and has helmed several others, remembered a
shoot in Seattle for Bigfoot, a 2012 picture that starred former Partridge Family cast member Danny Bonaduce and
Brady Bunch icon Barry “Greg Brady” Williams, during a
once-in-100-year winter storm in the region.
“For two weeks you couldn’t go out of your hotel room,”
Latt said. “We listened to music. I had the DP [director of
photography] go out and shoot a lot of B-roll for a future
movie about a snowstorm. And
thing that could be said of practhen we just doubled down.”
tically every film genre — Vitale
The weather also played a role
said the process varies by picture.
in Sharknado 2, which was filmed
“A great idea can come from
in New York in February duranywhere,” Vitale said. “Sharking one of the snowiest and coldtopus came from somebody
est winters on record. That made
who works in the promo deshooting the film — which was
partment; I think her daughsupposed to take place in the sumter just said the word one night
mer — especially challenging.
at home and thought it was a
“You just make it work,” Latt
funny word. This woman came
said. “We made the weather a
in to me and said ‘you’ve got to
character” by way of freakish
hear this word, sharktopus.’ I
weather patterns in the plot.
said Wow. That’s a movie.”
It’s not just the weather that
But in kicking in half the
can throw a wrench into filming. “On a TV movie, you can’t ask budget, Syfy also has firm ideas
Active Entertainment president
people to wait an hour before about what it expects to get for
Ken Badish remembers a shoot
its money. “We want a certain
they see the creature. They’ve number of action scenes, we
where one actor missed his plane
and tried to take a taxi cab from got their hands on the remote.” want a certain number of faDallas to a location about 60 minmiliar names in the cast and a
THOMAS VITALE, SYFY
utes outside of Baton Rouge, La.
certain amount of CGI effects,”
(about a 500-mile drive). Needless
Vitale said. “There is a budget
to say he didn’t make the shoot.
and there is a way to work within that budget.”
“We have to be light on our feet,” Badish said, adding
Syfy is involved in every step along the way, from choosthat the secret weapon for any independent producer is ing the director and the DP [director of photography], to
a core team of directors, writers and crew members who giving notes on the rough cut, to the scoring and the music.
know how to make pictures quickly and on budget and
While ideas can come from virtually anywhere, Vitale
can make necessary changes on the fly.
said many are ripped from the headlines. For instance,
“Two hundred movies ago when we started, every little Mansquito, a 2005 picture about a half-man, half mosquito
bump in the road was a catastrophe,” Latt said. “The bottom created by experiments to cure a highly contagious infecline is, you have to react in a smart way. Unless something tions disease, came about after several reports in the legititragic happens, you move on and make it work.”
mate press about West Nile Virus, which is transmitted by
A growing part of the success of films like these is the mosquitoes. Other examples include Larva, a 2005 movie
ability of the producers to see how certain scenes can drive about a giant mutant larva monster created by a mixture of
audience conversations on other mediums. Vitale pointed diseased cows and genetically altered cattle feed, spawned
to a scene in the first Sharktopus movie, which showed the from concerns tied to organic meat and food additives.
creature leaping from the sea to chomp a female bungee
But with a reliance on a typically fickle young audience,
jumper. That 10-second piece of video became a viral You- producers are well aware that the genre that has fed them
Tube hit after former Tonight Show host Jay Leno aired the so well over the past few years could dry up.
clip on his program.
For The Asylum, that means branching out and produc“The bungee-jumping bit in Sharktopus, that was the ing several other types of horror and action movies — like
money shot,” he said. “The movie was built from the gags.” alien-invasion film Age of Tomorrow and Mercenaries, an action movie in which an elite team of female mercenaries rescues a diplomat from a foreign women’s prison — as well as
SNACKABLE SCENES
Engleman calls it “bite-sized” film-making, adding that the Z Nation, a zombie television series for Syfy that already has
genre is tailor-made for small clips that can be shared as a 13-episode order.
It also means making sure that their content doesn’t get
memes, GIFs or Vines, six-second video clips that can be
lost in the growing avalanche of on-demand entertainment.
shared among friends.
“It’s a little disheartening, but the immediate future of
And it helps when the creature is shown early and often
in increasingly outrageous situations. While that is a depar- The Asylum is about understanding the priorities and stratture from some classic horror genres, Vitale said it’s a prod- egies of the companies that distribute movies now,” Rimawi
said. “You can’t make a movie and the audience just finds it
uct of the television medium.
“On a TV movie you can’t ask people to wait an hour be- anymore.”
While other networks are beginning to buy product,
fore they see the creature,” Vitale said. “They’ve got their
Rimawi said the biggest challenge is competing with mahands on the remote.”
For Vitale, no movie concept is too crazy, as long as it can jor studios that are increasingly producing shows for cable.
“It has never been so clear to us that we are competing for
be reasonably explained by a nuclear accident, a mad scientist or a genetic experiment gone terribly, terribly wrong. But scraps with the studios,” Rimawi said. “They are more agthat doesn’t mean the characters are not rooted in at least gressive then they’ve ever been, focusing every set of eyes on
every movie-goer.” )
some form of reality.
“These are not comedies,” Vitale added. “These are
campy, escapist movies. What sets a good B-movie apart is
x
that the character has to believe the situation is real, they
Watch a preview of Sharknado 2: The Second One
have to want to survive the situation and they have to react
and hear from screenwriter Thunder Levin in an
Internet-only Q&A. Click through at multichannel.
how that type of person would react.”
com/July28.
And while the movies are somewhat formulaic — some-
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