Did you enjoy Paranormal Activity? No matter if you did or didn’t, get ready for more of the same.

Made on a budget of $15,000, Paranormal Activity brought in a domestic box office of $107,484,801 which is apparently leading movie studio to launch a new micro-budget division that will produce films made on a budget of $100,00 or less.  According to the Los Angeles Times, the as-yet-unnamed new division will have a budget of $2 million per year, so in theory this could lead to 20 productions per year.

The majority of the productions probably won’t make it to the theater and are more envisioned as calling cards for filmmakers to possibly secure larger budget work.  Those that do go to the theater will have next to no advertising budget with a plan to simply promote them by word of mouth.  Midnight showings would also probably be the venue for those that do get theatrical releases as it would mean producing fewer prints of the films.

While this is somewhat inline with things I have said about studios needing to release smaller budget films, this approach has been tried before, and it has never ended well. The same article that announces this new division also points out that Twentieth Century Fox recently closed its Fox Atomic brand, and Universal Studios also just shut down its Rogue Pictures imprint by selling it to Relativity Media.

Every few years some low budget film like The Blair Witch Project ($60,000 budget, $248,639,099 international gross box office) comes along and the studios go all bonkers on making low budget films, and what they don’t realize is that you can’t manufacture successes like these.  They have to grow organically, and just because a movie cost $100,000 doesn’t mean it’s going to be good.

This idea has failed before, and it will again.  But, hey, it’s only going to cost them $2 million, so why not roll the dice?