On the fringes of the mainstream: what is a ‘B-movie’?
The term may have evolved well beyond its initial origins, but the B-movie remains a staple of the industry and more than likely always will. The second-tier of cinema production recently garnered a lot of traction after it lost one of its most important and influential figures: Roger Corman.
During Hollywood’s Golden Age, the term ‘B-movie’ was used to describe not only the films that hailed from outside the established ‘Big Five’ studios but also the ones that would play as the second half of a double-feature. Some audiences only wanted to watch the first one, so the so-called ‘lesser’ title was kept back until the end in a manner similar to a musical B-side.
When the double feature began to diminish in popularity, the B-movie ironically became more popular than ever. Having previously been the realm of the ‘Poverty Row’ studios that hopped on the mainstream’s trends and followed suit with vastly inferior resources, genre fare became pivotal to the counterculture era, with Corman leading the charge from the front.
The exploitation era breathed new life into the B-movie, with its various offshoots, including blaxploitation and sexploitation, churning out a succession of cult classics. With midnight showings, grindhouse theatres, and loosening restrictions enjoying a huge uptick in awareness, the B-tier of the film business was suddenly thriving to a much greater extent than ever before.
Low-budget movies helped foster ambition and creativity, while Corman alone played a huge part in launching the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, James Cameron, Ron Howard, and countless other filmmakers and actors who would go on to take mainstream Hollywood by storm after cutting their teeth in the B-movie arena.
The 21st century has made it harder to define what constitutes a B-movie, with some of the biggest and wealthiest outfits in the industry throwing their weight behind a succession of high-concept action, horror, and sci-fi stories that would have been right in Corman’s wheelhouse decades ago but now carry a budget more comparable to a standard blockbuster.
The average movie budget has skyrocketed to around $20million, but that doesn’t even tell part of the story. For every Hollywood epic that costs upwards of $200m, there are plenty of independent productions that cost pennies by comparison, meaning that the increasing gulf between the majors and the minors has forever skewed those figures.
Even taken at face value, $20million technically wouldn’t count as a B-movie budget because Corman and his contemporaries wouldn’t have known what to do with that sort of money, which is what makes it so difficult to discern what does or doesn’t accurately fit the bill since the turn of the millennium.
The closest thing to a genuine B-movie factory in the current landscape is The Asylum, which prides itself on mockbusters and knock-offs that read loudly from the Corman playbook. By its loosest definition the B-movie is made fast, made cheap, and with no airs or graces on competing for awards, which by extension means there might well be less of them today than there has been in decades.
