10 Bandwagons Hollywood Couldn't Resist Jumping On

4. The Found Footage Movie

Despite The Blair Witch Project earning almost $250m on a $25,000 budget back in 1999, it was almost a decade before Hollywood realized the potential low-risk/high-reward potential of the genre and the onslaught of found footage movies really began. When Paranormal Activity earned $193.4m with a production budget of just $15,000, the studios realized they had found a new avenue of potentially making huge profits without having to spend much cash. Ever since then, the found footage genre has reached saturation point and has spread far beyond just the horror genre. With budgets in the high thousands to low millions these projects would rarely lose money even if they bombed at the box office, and for an industry as financially-orientated as the movie business it was a win-win situation. Over the next several years multiple Paranormal Activity sequels, Diary of the Dead, Quarantine, The Last Exorcism, The Devil Inside, Apollo 18 and countless others hit theaters with increasing regularity as found footage became Hollywood's latest trend. The industry's penchant for found footage quickly spread beyond horror and began to infiltrate multiple genres including comedy (Project X, A Haunted House), the superhero movie (Chronicle), sci-fi (Europa Report) and even the disaster movie (Into the Storm). Much like the slashers of the 1980's and the 'torture porn' of the 2000's, found footage almost instantly became the go-to option for studios looking to make a quick buck in the horror genre. However, unlike the other two found footage could be applied to multiple genres and ended up becoming one of the fast-growing trends in recent memory, not to mention one of the most overused.