I've Been Mockbustered!

A lot of budding filmmakers start out with achievements in mind for themselves to reach throughout their filmmaking career. Milestones that mean they’ve ‘made it’ or something. Maybe it’s a Spirit Award, or an Oscar, or a Pal’eme D’oor (or whatever it's called). One that I had never even considered for myself, simply because I never imagined in a million years that I could achieve it, is to be mockbustered. But, it’s now happened!

What is a ‘mockbuster’, you might ask? These are films that follow the same or similar conceit/premise, and similar title, of a recently released film. A classic example would be that after ‘Snakes on a Plane’, a direct-to-video film was released called ‘Snakes on a Train’. After ‘Transformers’, we got ‘Transmorphers’. The list goes on—thousands of mockbusters have been made, and continue to be made.

You don’t have to have made a huge blockbuster movie in order to be mockbustered. A recent example of this would be ‘Bad CGI Sharks’, a charming 2019 film made by some really nice guys who collectively go by ‘MaJaMa’. This film is not known to anyone other than genre diehards, but despite this, in the last year ‘Bad CGI Gator’ has been made and released (not by them), with ‘Bad CGI Werewolves’ and ‘Big Bad CGI Monsters’ also on the way (and also not made by them).

When I saw that this had happened, I was happy for MaJaMa. When you get mockbustered, in my opinion, you just have to laugh rather than feel ripped off. They seem to be taking it in good spirits, having declared on Twitter ‘We literally birthed a subgenre’. That’s the right attitude.

I don’t know why, when it happened to them, that it didn’t enter into my mind that it could also happen to me. The same cinephiles who know ‘Bad CGI Sharks’ know my sharkless shark movies such as ‘No Shark’ and ‘Invisible Shark’, so it should have clicked, but it didn’t. So, when a day ago I discovered that ‘The Invisible Raptor’ had recently been crapped out, my jaw dropped. Then, I smiled.

I didn’t realize how much this would mean to me. I can’t describe the feeling, or why it means something at all. I guess it goes back to the old saying of the highest form of flattery being imitation. However, it should be noted that it is odd that we are now in an era where mockbusters can be a lot higher budgeted than the movies they are mockbusting. How’s that for an absurdly level playing field? Go make your own movie!

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