10 Movies Made With Shockingly Low Budgets

Every once in a while, a movie that has little going for it in terms of budget or box office expectations comes along and blows everyone away. One such film is 2004's Napoleon Dynamite, which earned $46 million off of a budget of just $400,000.

Napoleon Dynamite doesn't look like a movie that cost a lot of money to make, but considering the impact it had on pop culture as a cult classic, it's hard to imagine it could be put together for such a small amount of money.

One of the main reasons the film cost so little to make was the ridiculously low salaries paid to the people who made it. Jon Heder, who starred in the titular role, only received a payment of $1,000. Granted, he was able to renegotiate for a cut of the profits after the movie killed it at the box office, but that money didn't come out of the production budget in any way.

In addition to the low salary costs, the movie had very little in terms of post-production requirements, a 22-day filming shoot, minimal costs for location expenses, costumes, or anything else that traditionally inflates a movie budget to astronomical proportions.