Wonder Woman. Alien: Covenant. Spider-Man Homecoming. Blockbuster season is upon us once more, but how about supplementing your multiplex fare with a few fan films?
Shot on minuscule budgets in people’s homes, businesses and backyards, fan films are more than just videos cobbled together from existing footage—they are new movies inspired by a familiar franchise.
And some of them are surprisingly good.
One of the best-known is Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, a shot-for-shot remake of the classic Indiana Jones movie—produced, directed by and starring three junior high school students from Mississippi. Ten-year-old Chris Strompolos fell in love with Steven Spielberg’s whip-cracking adventure on its first release in 1981, and convinced his friends Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb to help him make his own version of the movie. Over the next seven years the boys recreated everything from the boulder chase to the fiery gunfight in Marion Ravenwood’s bar (the latter left Zala slightly singed). Their backyard odyssey was eventually screened at the Butt-Numb-a-Thon movie festival and has even drawn the attention and approval of Spielberg himself.
Spielberg’s friend and co-Indiana Jones creator George Lucas has also inspired his fair share of fan films, most of them set in a galaxy far, far away. The Star Wars series has spawned so many fan productions that there is a website devoted to cataloguing them. Most of the films are just an excuse to swish a lightsaber around, but others are more creative. Troops plays like a parody of COPS, following a group of Imperial Storm Troopers on patrol in Tatooine, while Star Wars: Revelations is an ambitious saga about Jedi knights resisting the Empire after Revenge of the Sith. Revelations not only runs nearly 50 minutes long—five times the length of the average fan film—but also boasts a solid plot and special effects.
Comic book fans have also taken to filmmaking with the sort of “what if?” stories audiences might never see elsewhere. In Batman: Dead End, the Caped Crusader chases after the Joker, only to find himself battling Aliens and Predators. (Dead End was clearly a labor of love—the closing credits are nearly as long as the film itself—but also an effective demonstration reel for director Sandy Collora. He went on to shoot his first feature film, Hunter Prey, in 2010.)
Besides presenting brand new stories, fan films sometimes fill in the gaps left by Hollywood. The Hanging Tree, a short film released by Mainstay Productions, develops Hunger Games heroine Katniss Everdeen’s relationship with her father—an important character who dies before much of the book’s plot begins, and who was subsequently left out of the big-budget adaptation.
Fan films are the ultimate expression of devotion to a series—and with the rise of digital cameras and sophisticated editing and computer graphics software, it’s never been easier for people to imitate and become part of their favorite stories on-screen.
Leave a Reply