Another studio is looking to copy Marvel Studio’s lead and is looking to build their own interconnected cinematic universe. Cinedigm and producers Lou Arkoff (Inspector Gadget), Jeff Katz (Snakes On A Plane) and Hal Sadoff (Hotel Rwanda) are teaming up to build a ten-film shared universe and are using films from exploitation house American International Pictures as the source material.
Arkoff, son of AIP founder Samuel Arkoff, explained to Variety –
In a unique twist on the current filmmaking model, all 10 films will shoot back-to-back and share a single movie universe with a big recurring cast of antiheroes, monsters and bad girls… This format will allow our casts and directors to build a strong relationship with the characters — and our audience — over the course of several films.
The films being mined for the project are Girls In Prison, Viking Women And The Sea Serpent, The Brain Eaters, She-Creature, Teenage Caveman, Reform School Girl, The Undead, War Of The Colossal Beast, The Cool And The Crazy and The Day The World Ended.
Katz expanded on the idea of the film’s interconnectiveness.
Each movie in this series has a complete beginning, middle and end, yet watched over all 10 films we’re really telling one larger, epic story. These are very much, at heart, indie comic book movies. Unpretentious. R-Rated. It’s fantastic to have a distribution model that fits that sensibility.
Katz may call the films “unpretentious,” but the plan is certainly Ambitious. Shooting Back-to-back-to-back-to-etcetera will cost a large amount of money, even if, as I suspect, these films have individually small budgets. What I find really intriguing about this plan, though, is the idea that they are taking these completely unrelated films and interweaving them into one larger tapestry, especially given that while some of the original films are set in the modern age, there are a few, like Teenage Caveman and Viking Women And The Sea Serpent, which are not. Also interesting is that they are using War Of The Colossal Beast, which is a sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man, but not the original film. Strictly from a storytelling aspect, I can’t wait to see how they tie all these disparate elements together.
Good lord…