Options Menu.
I had a weird idea for a movie. Take your classic horror/action monster elimination movie them. This is a huge theme, by the way, an encompasses everything from "Alien" to "Friday the 13th." The trope is simple: One monster/villain, a gaggle of victims, and slowly killing them off one at a time until there is only one or two left before the showdown where they turn the tables and beat the monster. Oh, and if you make the victims and monsters into the same people you get "Hunger Games." Seriously, this trope is damn near everywhere.
Next assemble your cast of a dozen victims and throw them into your setting with your monster. Let's say it's a SciFi setting, because I'm most familiar with that particular flavor of this genre. Get a big cast, say 12+ expendable pawns, for this movie.
Now the idea here is two things: That you're going to go direct to DVD, so the budget doesn't have to be very high. That's important because of what we're going to do next. The second is that DVDs are a waste of space. The amount of data that a DVD can hold is usually more than 100x more than the size of the film, depending on the format codec. So we're going to use that by actually making three films at once.
Sequels? Not at all! Rather, three different versions of the same movie. You know, like they did with "Clue" only applied to a horror format. Hey, I didn't say this was an entirely original idea. But to make it more interesting, each time we're going to change the monster too. Only the crew, the ship, and the place they're investigating stays the same each time. The creature changes and so does the ending and the short list of who actually survives gets changed up in each version.
So let's say in the first you do the classic "Alien" formula of one sneaky critter the pops out of shadows and picks everyone off, one by one, until the last, say, two survivors manage to escape back to their ship, with a twist ending that the creature hid some eggs in their cargo bay or something. In the second version the same twelve crew arrive at the same station to discover that they're been some kind of outbreak from an experiment gone wrong, and we're doing the "Dead Space" thing where the inhabitants have turned into a horde of monster/zombie things. The whole thing becomes a big chase scene back to their ship and the deaths are quick and in rapid succession. Also, one person makes it and it's a different person as last time. Then you do that third incarnation where it seems like there's no monster at all, only a natural disaster (reactor leak? asteroid strike?) that has wiped out the station, but as they go on they realize it was a computer virus sent by a rival company to kill everyone on board - and now they're the one's on board. This time three people make it out alive, and again it's a different set of three.
This actually wouldn't be that much more expensive to do, since you're just reusing the same actors (whom you're already paying), the same sets, and the same film crew over & over. It's getting all that stuff assembled into one place that's your biggest expense, and that's already done. Then you pack them all together onto a single DVD and sell it. The novelty value alone should ensure decent sales and get you plenty of free publicity.
Next assemble your cast of a dozen victims and throw them into your setting with your monster. Let's say it's a SciFi setting, because I'm most familiar with that particular flavor of this genre. Get a big cast, say 12+ expendable pawns, for this movie.
Now the idea here is two things: That you're going to go direct to DVD, so the budget doesn't have to be very high. That's important because of what we're going to do next. The second is that DVDs are a waste of space. The amount of data that a DVD can hold is usually more than 100x more than the size of the film, depending on the format codec. So we're going to use that by actually making three films at once.
Sequels? Not at all! Rather, three different versions of the same movie. You know, like they did with "Clue" only applied to a horror format. Hey, I didn't say this was an entirely original idea. But to make it more interesting, each time we're going to change the monster too. Only the crew, the ship, and the place they're investigating stays the same each time. The creature changes and so does the ending and the short list of who actually survives gets changed up in each version.
So let's say in the first you do the classic "Alien" formula of one sneaky critter the pops out of shadows and picks everyone off, one by one, until the last, say, two survivors manage to escape back to their ship, with a twist ending that the creature hid some eggs in their cargo bay or something. In the second version the same twelve crew arrive at the same station to discover that they're been some kind of outbreak from an experiment gone wrong, and we're doing the "Dead Space" thing where the inhabitants have turned into a horde of monster/zombie things. The whole thing becomes a big chase scene back to their ship and the deaths are quick and in rapid succession. Also, one person makes it and it's a different person as last time. Then you do that third incarnation where it seems like there's no monster at all, only a natural disaster (reactor leak? asteroid strike?) that has wiped out the station, but as they go on they realize it was a computer virus sent by a rival company to kill everyone on board - and now they're the one's on board. This time three people make it out alive, and again it's a different set of three.
This actually wouldn't be that much more expensive to do, since you're just reusing the same actors (whom you're already paying), the same sets, and the same film crew over & over. It's getting all that stuff assembled into one place that's your biggest expense, and that's already done. Then you pack them all together onto a single DVD and sell it. The novelty value alone should ensure decent sales and get you plenty of free publicity.