Most modern kaiju films have whopping nine-figure budgets, but one of the genre’s greatest entries was surprisingly cheap to produce. The kaiju genre originated in Japan and was created by Eiji Tsuburaya and Ishirō Honda with their groundbreaking 1954 masterpiece. GodzillaBut since the spectacle of giant monsters destroying cities broke down the language barrier, the popularity of the Kaiju genre has spread around the world. Godzilla was the beginning of an international franchise and a subgenre of science fiction. Godzilla and his ilk continue to draw crowds to cinemas around the world today.

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 films. These original kaiju films can be a risky gamble because they tend to be expensive and therefore need to make a lot of money. But one original kaiju film became such a huge success 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 typically spent on small, character-driven dramas with no visual effects and no big 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 kaiju thriller Cloverfield was produced with a budget of only $25 million (via Box office hit). The film is presented as footage recovered from a camcorder by the Department of Defense. It begins with a group of friends throwing a going away 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 film is a fight for survival against the monster, dubbed “Clover”.

Although the film was initially dismissed as a B-movie, a viral marketing campaign and positive reviews transformed it Cloverfield a surprise hit. The film grossed $172,394,180 at the worldwide box office. and started a Cloverfield Franchise with the spin-offs 10 Cloverfield Street in 2016 and The Cloverfield Paradox in 2018. If Cloverfield If it had been given a huge budget of $200 million, it would have been a huge success and spin-offs would have been out of the question. But because the film had a more conservative price tag of $25 million, it was considered a huge success.

How Cloverfield’s budget compares to the MonsterVerse films

The cheapest MonsterVerse film cost five times more than Cloverfield

CloverfieldCompared to the costs of other modern Kaiju films, the budget seems even smaller. The MonsterVerse is the best measure of what Hollywood is willing to spend on Kaiju films – it is the shared Marvel-style cinematic universe in which Legendary Pictures has collected Godzilla, Kong and their related characters – and CloverfieldThe budget of is a fraction of theirs. The MonsterVerse began with the reboot of Godzillawhose production cost 160 million dollars. Kong: Skull Island was even more expensive, with a price tag of $185 million.

The next two films in the MonsterVerse, Godzilla: King of the Monsters And Godzilla vs. Kongcosts up to 200 million dollars, eight times the price of Cloverfield Cost. The latest entry in the MonsterVerse franchise, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empirehad a slightly smaller budget of around 150 million dollars, but that is still significantly more than Cloverfield costs. The fact that The MonsterVerse films all cost between six and eight times the budget of Cloverfield makes it easy Cloverfield look even more impressive.

Cloverfield’s lower budget made the film better

CloverfieldThe smaller budget made it a better and more unique film. If it had a huge budget and featured the monster much more, then there would be nothing to distinguish it from other Kaiju films. But the “found footage” style of Cloverfield allowed it to do things the genre had never done before. The “found footage” gimmick can be tiring if not used properly – especially at the height of the subgenre’s popularity in the 2000s – but in Cloverfieldit’s great. It gave the audience a perspective on a giant monster they’d never seen before.

Since the entire film was shot from the characters’ point of view, the audience was placed in their shoes, watching Clover’s rampage from the street. The omniscient camera angles of the Godzilla Movies are great for mindless spectacle, but it’s hard to elicit an emotional response because the audience can’t put themselves in that position. The ground camera work of Cloverfield makes it much more immersiveand gives viewers the feeling of actually being there, escaping, as a massive creature tears New York City to pieces.

Source: Box office hit