On Facebook (which I only visit very rarely), screenwriter Bill Martell asked for titles and loglines for Asylum-style mockbusters based on Oscar-nominated movies. Here are the ones I thought of first:
BACK FROM BROKEN MOUNTAIN – A cowboy once lost on Broken Mountain and presumed dead suddenly returns with amnesia… and memory flashes of an alien abduction experience.
EVERYONE ARRIVES AT ONCE – A Chinese-American woman expecting family to arrive for the holidays suddenly finds herself playing host to five versions of herself from alternate timelines.
A WORLD OF OLD MEN – A variation on Children of Men, in which no females have been born in 75 years, leaving nothing but men populating the planet.
MAVERICK GUNNER – A pilot downed behind enemy lines becomes a one-man guerrilla force.
THE WALLS OF WOLF STREET – A gated community becomes a death trap when several families find themselves locked inside with a werewolf.
Heck, I’d watch some of those—especially A World of Old Men, although (as with Children of Men) the story would pretty much have to be about the one exception, a gal who was somehow born more recently into this otherwise all-male world and is shown to be capable of bearing more daughters and whose life must therefore be preserved at all costs. (I figure the plot would also be something like that of the Freezing Reign novel someone submitted to Cover Critics back in 2022.) Back From Broken Mountain and The Walls of Wolf Street would—like many mockbusters—be lower-budget cheesy horror-comedy flicks, though watchable all the same; and Maverick Gunner would basically be another “one-man army” action flick like Commando or any of a dozen other Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Bruce Willis movies. (As for Everyone Arrives All At Once? I haven’t seen Everywhere All At Once, so I can’t really comment, although your premise sounds like it would be a fun little family comedy.)
While looking through the long list of Academy Award nominees on Wikipedia for ideas of my own, I couldn’t help noticing just how many of these movies could also be classified as “crappy self-important propaganda that almost nobody actually wants to watch.” There are some actual popular box office smash hits on there, sure (e.g. Gone With The Wind, Joker, and most of the Star Wars movies), but “blockbusters” the majority of them clearly were not. So, rather than the “mockbusters” as Bill Martell is requesting, some of my ideas would probably be classified more as parodies or spoofs or send-ups.
Some of my ideas:
The Raspberry: An egotistical maker of low-budget schlock does everything he can to avoid “winning” Razzie awards for a direct-to-video movie he wrote, directed, produced, and scored, and in which he also played the protagonist and several supporting characters. Said movie somehow came to be a cult classic, selling remarkably well on its reputation for being hilariously awful, and he has thus been nominated for nine Golden Raspberry awards. In spite of all his efforts to bribe the voters, he and his crappy movie end up making a clean sweep of the ceremony. He eventually gets over his heartbreak at taking home all nine awards when he realizes all the money his movie made on its hilariously terrible reputation has got studio executives from low-budget studios and productions all over the world inviting him to come make a movie (or star in one) for them in hopes that they can score some of his “cult classic cash” for themselves.
Crown Heights Story: Basically, this is the full movie of In Living Color‘s parody of West Side Story. It’s the tragicomic story of a Romeo-and-Juliet style romance between a Jewish guy and black gal from two competing ethnic street gangs in Crown Heights in 1991. After the couple’s tragic death, the two gangs come together in racial harmony… to lynch an Al Sharpton expy.
The House That Crack Built: This is a Canadian animated short based on the 1992 children’s book of the same title by Clark Taylor; narrated in the same style as a children’s book, but actually intended more for mature audiences.
City Slicker Elegy: This made-for-streaming-services movie is a black comedy biopic about Kamala Harris covering her tumultuous upbringing and the ups and downs of her political career in all the years leading up to 2020 (prominently featuring her “sugar daddy” Willie Brown). It ends in early 2020 with the announcement of a two-week nationwide shutdown “to flatten the curve” in lieu of the mysterious new “Wuhan Virus” pandemic.
Starcrash Before: This prequel to Starcrash is definitely not a rip-off of the new Star Trek movies just as the original was certainly not plagiarized from the original Star Wars trilogy.
The Raspberry is the most meta-cult movie idea I’ve ever heard.
Heh. If Honest Trailers can call La La Land a Hollywood Handjob, I figure I can make fun of the 1966 movie The Oscar (nominated for two awards, though it didn’t win any) as Hollywood’s Autofellation; or I could just suggest a parody featuring the Oscars’ counterpart called The Raspberry.