The Asylum is an interesting film production company. On the one hand, I give them props for sheer brazenness. In addition to sharing Sharknado with the world, this is the company that produces direct-to-cable or -DVD films that often bear remarkable resemblances to, and with release dates in close proximity to, major Hollywood films. When I Am Legend came out in 2007, The Asylum released I Am Omega (or I Am Ωmega). (That’s even funnier if you know the Will Smith movie’s predecessor.) Its counterpart to Roland Emmerich’s 2008 film 10,000 BC was entitled 100 Million BC, and apparently had dinosaurs. The Keanu Reeves-led remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still was joined, so to speak, by The Day the Earth Stopped. Right before the Brendan Fraser film Journey to the Center of the Earth came out in theaters, The Asylum released a film starring Greg Evigan (the other one of My Two Dads) entitled…..Journey to the Center of the Earth. I guess there’s plenty of Jules Verne to go around. The list goes on and on.

For the most part, The Asylum seems to have avoided serious legal entanglements with regard to their films’ occasional similarity to movies that get actual theatrical releases. Sony, which distributed the 2011 film Battle: Los Angeles in the rental market, took legal action against the directors of 2010’s Skyline because of similarities between the two films. The Asylum’s Battle of Los Angeles [emphasis added], released just before Battle: Los Angeles, did not have the same legal issues.

You might think that The Asylum would have some major copyright problems, with a movie like The Terminators coming out close to the same time as Terminator Salvation. You can’t copyright an idea, though. This is how movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact can coexist. Continue reading →