What was the cheapest movie to reach number one at the box office?
In modern Hollywood, it’s become a depressing reality that the majority of movies which make any money are blockbusters that cost $100, $200, or even $300million to make. The gap between those behemoths and lower-budgeted flicks has never been larger, and it’s led to a situation in which the average film needs to make upwards of $500m to $1bn to even be viewed as a success.
It wasn’t always this way, though. Throughout the years, plenty of low-budget success stories have wowed Hollywood, proving that when a filmmaker has ingenuity, shows an audience something new, and combines that with a killer marketing campaign, it’s still possible to rake in millions of dollars on a much, much smaller outlay.
Indeed, a low-budget independent movie success story has been a career launching pad for the likes of David Lynch, Kevin Smith, Spike Lee, and Darren Aronofsky. They made Eraserhead, Clerks, She’s Gotta Have It, and Pi for $100,000, $27,000, $175,000, and $68,000, respectively, and parlayed these calling card movies into long, illustrious careers. Well, maybe Smith might baulk at his career being dubbed “illustrious”, but you get the point.
However, when looking at low-budget movies that raked in money at the box office, one reliable genre appears repeatedly: horror. Indeed, it’s an open secret among aspiring filmmakers that horror films are often the best bet for a debut movie, as they can generally be made cheaply, don’t need to have any star power attached, and have a built-in audience that is always ready to give something new a shot.
The best illustration of this is that John Carpenter’s 1978 classic Halloween was the highest-grossing independent movie of all time for 21 years. It was dethroned only by The Blair Witch Project, another low-budget horror phenomenon.
Drilling down even further into the horror numbers reveals something unexpected. Despite Halloween and The Blair Witch Project being genuine cultural touchstones, neither actually hit the number one spot at the US box office during their releases. Still, the vast majority of cheap flicks that have hit the heady heights of number one are horror movies, and they include 1980’s Friday the 13th (made for $550,000), 2012’s The Devil Inside ($1m), 2004’s Saw ($1.2m), and 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street ($1.8m).
So, what was the cheapest movie to reach number one?
Intriguingly, pinpointing the cheapest film to reach number one at the box office isn’t quite as simple as it sounds. That’s because there are two contenders, and only one of them achieved the feat in an entirely above-board manner. Allow me to explain.
In 2020, Christian Nilsson’s Unsubscribe opened and was soon being touted as a zero-budget movie that reached number one in the US. On the surface, that sounds like an astonishing feat, but in reality, there was more than a little chicanery and subterfuge behind it.
The 29-minute horror movie—a runtime which barely even qualifies it as a feature film—was written and shot in just four days, expressly with the purpose of taking advantage of cinemas being closed during the pandemic. Nilsson proceeded to “four-wall” the film, which entailed buying every ticket for five showings of the movie at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Centre in New York.
This dubious method allowed him to keep the $25,488 in ticket sales that he spent, but it was still recorded as paying customers for the film. Soon, because every other cinema in the country was closed, Unsubscribe was listed as the number one movie in the US.
Ultimately, Nilsson concocted a clever publicity stunt that has gone down in the record books. However, that achievement isn’t even remotely the same as when Paranormal Activity, made for only $15,000, legitimately hit number one in 2009.
At that point, Oren Peli’s hair-raising found-footage haunted house movie, which was shot in his own home, had built up word-of-mouth in its three weeks of release. When it achieved number one status and stayed at the top of the chart for a whole week, it truly made history, and soon spawned a mega-franchise that has grossed nearly $900m at the worldwide box office.
