One of the best kaiju movies of all time had a ridiculously low budget

Most modern kaiju movies have been commanding nine-figure budgets, but one of the biggest entries in the genre was surprisingly cheap to produce. The kaiju genre originated in Japan and was created by Eiji Tsuburaya and Ishiō Honda with their groundbreaking 1954 masterpiece Godzilla. But since the spectacle of giant monsters destroying cities crosses the language barrier, the popularity of the kaiju genre has spread throughout the world. Godzilla Kicked off both an international franchise and a subgenre of science fiction. Godzilla and his ilk continue to draw crowds to movie theaters around the world.

Hollywood has had a lot of success licensing popular kaiju characters like Godzilla and King Kong, but there have also been a handful of successful original kaiju movies. The original kaiju movies can be a risky gamble because they tend to be expensive, so they have to make a lot of money. But one original kaiju film became such a huge hit that it launched a sprawling, interconnected franchise because it wasn’t ridiculously expensive to produce. In fact, it was made for the kind of budget usually given to small-scale, character-driven dramas with no visual effects and no big-name stars.

Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield had a budget of $25 million

Cloverfield was produced for a fraction of the average Hollywood blockbuster

Matt Reeves ‘found footage’ thriller Cloverfield was produced for a budget of only $25 million (by Box Office Mojo). The movie is presented as footage recovered from a camcorder by the Department of Defense. It begins with a group of friends throwing a farewell party for a man named Rob, who is leaving New York City to take a new job in Japan. During the party, there is a power outage in the city and they are shocked to discover that a giant monster has arrived. The rest of the movie is a fight for survival against the monster, dubbed “Clover.”

Although it was initially dismissed as a B-movie, a viral marketing campaign and a positive critical reception turned it around Cloverfield In a sleep beat. It grossed $172,394,180 at the worldwide box office and launched a Cloverfield Franchise with the spin-offs 10 Cloverfield Lane In 2016 and The Cloverfield Paradox in 2018. If Cloverfield Given a massive $200 million budget, it would have been a bomb And spin-offs would have been out of the question. But because it had a more conservative $25 million price tag, it was deemed a huge hit.

How Cloverfield’s budget compares to the MonsterVerse movies

The cheapest Monsterverse movie costs five times more than Cloverfield

Cloverfield‘s budget looks even smaller when compared to what other modern kaiju movies have cost. The MonsterVerse is the best metric for what Hollywood is willing to spend on kaiju movies – This is the Marvel-style shared cinematic universe where Legendary Pictures has collected Godzilla, Kong and their related characters – and Cloverfields budget is a fraction of theirs. The MonsterVerse kicked off with the 2014 reboot of GodzillaWhich cost $160 million to produce. Kong: Skull Island was even more expensive with a price tag of $185 million.

The next two movies in the MonsterVerse, Godzilla: King of the Monsters And Godzilla vs. KongCost up to $ 200 million, which is eight times that Cloverfield Price. The latest entry in the MonsterVerse franchise, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empirehad a slightly smaller budget of around $150 million, but that’s still significantly more than Cloverfield Cost to make. The fact that The MonsterVerse movies all cost somewhere between six and eight times the budget of Cloverfield Just makes Cloverfield Look even more impressive.

Cloverfield’s lower budget made the movie better

CloverfieldIts lower budget made it a better and more unique movie. If it had a massive budget and showed the monster a lot more, there would be nothing to distinguish it from other kiju movies. But the “found footage” style of Cloverfield Allowing it to do things the genre has never done before. The “found footage” gimmick can be tiresome if not used correctly – especially at the height of the subgenre’s popularity in the 2000s – but in CloverfieldIt is great. It gave audiences a perspective of a giant monster they had never seen before.

Filming the entire movie from the character’s point-of-view puts the audience in their shoes on the ground level, witnessing Clover’s rampage from the street. The diminishing camera angles of the Godzilla Movies are great for mindless spectacle, but it’s hard to get a visceral reaction because the audience can’t imagine themselves in that position. The ground-level cameras of Cloverfield Makes it much more immersiveAnd makes the viewers feel like they are actually there, fleeing as a huge creature tears New York City.

Source: Box Office Mojo