Despite the fact that his roots were in low-budget horror filmmaking, director Adam Wingard had spent the last several years away from the genre, playing in a much larger sandbox for much bigger audiences under the guise of Legendary’s MonsterVerse films. Those films were very much at a crossroads when Wingard was brought into the series, with Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters having underperformed at the box office and been met with tepid-to-negative reviews.
In response, Wingard opted to make the next installment, Godzilla vs. Kong, a far simpler, lean, mean monster-fighting machine of a movie, and the results speak for themselves. Despite its release being hampered by the COVID pandemic, the film was a massive hit that put that franchise back on the map and succeeded at bringing people back to the theaters for the very first time post-lockdowns.
It’s no exaggeration to say that without the success of Wingard’s film, there would be no continuing adventures of Godzilla and Kong in this capacity, nor any of the numerous spinoffs that have occurred since. For his success, Wingard was brought back to helm the follow-up, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, but ultimately decided to step away from the franchise after that second film in favor of pursuing something more in line with his genre roots. That film became Onslaught, an A24 horror-thriller that just released this weekend, and sees the filmmaker returning to the kinds of stories he’s always loved telling, but with a far greater amount of resources at his disposal. As such, Wingard is uniquely suited to discuss the differences between low-budget and high-budget genre fare, as he has seen it from just about every side of the spectrum. This makes his recent comments about Obsession’s success all the more fascinating.
Earlier this year, Curry Barker’s Obsession was released, and within a month of that release, the low-budget, high-concept horror film had turned into a bona fide pop-cultural phenomenon. Despite only having a budget of $750,000, Obsession became one of the highest-grossing films of the year. This positioned the film in stark contrast to big-budget misfires that released within the same time frame, such as The Mandalorian and Grogu or Supergirl, and fueled a larger discourse about movie budgets and why they’ve ballooned to such extremes in recent years.
In speaking about this in a recent bit of press for Onslaught, Wingard referenced Obsession’s success directly. “Look at Obsession. If you’re making a movie that cheap, nobody gets paid and nobody’s making a living. This movie was made for $750,000, and it’s an amazing movie, an amazing accomplishment for Curry. But it’s not like he or anybody else made that movie for any other reason other than the fact that that’s probably all they could get to make it, right? That’s not a sustainable model.”
Wingard goes on to elaborate that "I even looked at it like, in the terms of Godzilla Minus One versus the Legendary MonsterVerse movies. If you’re making Godzilla Minus One for $10 million, that means that a lot of people didn’t get paid. That’s the unfortunate truth. That’s fine for like, a passion project, but it’s not sustainable… You can’t all make cheap movies, and guess what? I guarantee you he (Curry Barker) is not going to make another $750,000 movie.”
In essence, the point Wingard is making is that despite the monumental artistic accomplishments that films like Obsession and even Godzilla Minus One are (Wingard himself is a huge fan of both movies), the only way those films were made for such low budgets was out of necessity and by people who were not necessarily getting proper compensation for their work. This has been shown to be true by the numerous legal issues that have arisen for Obsession after the fact. Everyone who is pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into the production of a work of art deserves to be making a living off of doing so, and Wingard makes that point eloquently.
Again, this is a dude who has directed multiple low-budget horror films and knows the exact kinds of perils he’s talking about. With something like Onslaught, he had the sizable budget to not only realize his vision but also ensure that everyone on the crew was fairly compensated, and that’s pretty rad.
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