How Roger Corman’s Zany B-Movies Invented The Modern Blockbuster

Fifty years into the blockbuster era, it’s easy to forget that the American film industry wasn’t always focused on making genre movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and vacuum up A-list actors. That’s not to say that there weren’t movies that dominated the cultural conversation — Disney animated films were very popular in the 1940s and ’50s, for example — but the idea of, say, spending the equivalent of $300 million on a movie based on a comic book would have been laughable to studio executives in the late ’50s and early ’60s. At that time, science fiction, action, and horror movies were considered disposable, low-budget fare made for drive-ins and kiddie matinees. And Roger Corman was their king.

Corman, who passed away in 2024 at the age of 98, was a prolific producer and director of B-movies, first with American International Pictures and then under his own companies, New World Pictures and New Horizons. (At the time of his passing, he had 489 credits as a producer, and 56 as a director.) Corman was famous for his no-nonsense approach to filmmaking, which can be summed up by the mantra “make ’em quick, make ’em cheap, and make ’em popular.”

The Corman method meant churning out a completed feature film in a matter of weeks: “I was shooting a picture during the day, casting another picture during the lunch hour, and editing the previous picture in the evening,” Corman said in a 2014 interview with filmmaker Jonathan Demme, who got his start directing for Corman. It also meant putting marketability first — sometimes the poster for a movie preceded the script — and artistic considerations second.

Corman’s first film as a producer was Monster From the Ocean Floor (1954), the first in a wave of rubber-suit monster movies with colorful titles — Attack of the Crab Monsters, for example, or The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent — he would produce and/or direct throughout the 1950s. His second, The Fast and the Furious, cannily combined the racing picture with a romantic tale of outlaws on the run. Although they have little in common, The Fast and the Furious eventually lent its name to the multibillion-dollar franchise: Rob Cohen, the director of the 2001 version, claims he traded the title rights to Corman for stock footage.

That alone would earn Corman a place in blockbuster history. But the cheapo quickies that Corman and company churned out throughout the 1950s and ’60s were heralds of a style of filmmaking that would eventually swallow Hollywood whole. Blockbuster filmmaking uses a formula established by Corman and his stable of directors — “a good degree of sex, some violence, a bit of nudity, and perhaps a subtle social statement,” as Demme described it — and injects it with big budgets and big-name talent.

“James Cameron, who started his career working for Corman, has consistently proven that you can make epic films that are based 100 percent on the structure of Corman-style genre pictures,” Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel director Alex Stapleton told Wired in 2011. Cameron’s producer, Gale Anne Hurd, also began her career under Corman, and together the two created some of the finest — and highest-grossing — blockbuster action films of the ’80s and ’90s. Both Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day are based on premises that just a couple of decades earlier would have been B-movies and not huge Hollywood productions. But the similarities don’t end there.

Although the piece only briefly mentions Corman, a 2025 article in The New York Times breaking down the structure of Jaws — another massively influential and profitable film with a Roger Corman premise — handily describes the B-movie formula he made famous: “A [CREATURE] stalks a [LOCATION] and attacks [FIRST VICTIM]. Later, the [RELUCTANT HERO] challenges [LOCAL AUTHORITY] and enlists [EXPERTS]. Finally, [SACRIFICE] leads to [CONFRONTATION] and [CREATURE’S] death.” This formula can be applied to Ridley Scott’s Alien, as well as Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. It’s also present in multiple movies Corman directed and/or produced: Take his 1956 film It Conquered the World, in which a Venusian vegetable monster takes over a California beach town with the unwitting help of a naive scientist.

Ironically, Corman commissioned several Jaws rip-offs in the wake of that film’s success, copying the formula of a movie that was based on some of Corman’s own films. This kind of self-cannibalizing is ubiquitous in modern-day Hollywood, where studio executives with the cutthroat attitudes of the exploitation producers of yore race to see who can get their take on a trendy premise into theaters first. This is how we get, say, Deep Impact and Armageddon (produced by Gale Anne Hurd) hitting theaters within months of each other, each leaning on the same exploitable elements.

Corman’s work as a producer was based on the concept of “exploitable elements,” splashy (and often shocking and/or titillating) hooks that are easily communicated to potential viewers through titles and posters alone. In Corman’s case, this was done to sell tickets in the absence of big budgets and well-known stars. But from the success of Jaws and Star Wars onward, blockbuster movies have expanded the reach — and the profitability — of this method by appealing to filmgoers who go to see movies for what they’re about and those who see movies for who’s in them.

Another of Corman’s innovations was making movies specifically designed to appeal to teenagers, then a relatively new demographic. (The word “teen-ager” first appeared in an article in Life magazine in December 1944.) Although modern-day blockbusters are, by definition, designed to play to the widest audiences possible, the core audience for big-budget action, horror, and superhero movies was, until quite recently, teenagers — specifically, males between the ages of 18 and 24. (That audience is now aging, but that’s a topic for another essay.)

If Hollywood wants to keep up, it’ll need to take a lesson from Corman, who evolved the types of movies he was making alongside changes in youth culture. Corman spent the early ’60s directing a series of horror films shot in spectacular Technicolor that are popularly referred to as the “Poe Cycle.” But while those movies made money, by the mid-’60s it became clear that the culture was shifting. So Corman made The Wild Angels, an outlaw biker movie starring Bruce Dern and Peter Fonda. Released three years before Easy Rider, it anticipates the counterculture spirit that made that movie such a massive success.

The same would go for Corman’s 1967 LSD-sploitation movie The Trip, as well as 1975’s Death Race 2000, whose premise — a high-stakes futuristic race across a dystopian America — anticipates what The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calls “that bread-and-circuses futurism that persists now in the form of The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner.” But another of Corman’s most clairvoyant moments also became one of his biggest failures.

In 1993, Corman gave German producer Bernd Eichinger $1 million to make a movie based on Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Fantastic Four, the option for which Eichinger had purchased for an absurdly low sum back in 1986. Trailers for the movie played in theaters that summer, and clips were shown at the 1993 San Diego Comic-Con. But then Marvel Comics executive (and later Marvel Studios founder) Avi Arad bought out the producers and destroyed all prints of the film, nuking its release and leaving only poor-quality bootlegs for fans to wonder over for the next 30-plus years.

This was during a low point for superhero movies: In the early to mid-’90s, Batman was basically the only option for the tights-and-capes set, and Marvel’s own efforts to get films based on its characters off the ground during this era were unsuccessful. It’s difficult to say why Arad was so opposed to Corman’s Fantastic Four, but something Stan Lee said at Comic-Con that year provides a clue: “It’s the last movie to be made that we in Marvel had no control over,” he told the crowd. “There will be no other projects like that.” And indeed, within a decade, Marvel Studios was a force to be reckoned with within the film industry. Could it have been a kick in the butt from a scrappy independent studio that made Marvel finally take its own ambitions seriously?

The massive industry that’s been built around superhero movies over the past couple of decades is, in many ways, the opposite of Corman’s films, which took big risks and made big promises. Sometimes they failed to deliver, but that was mostly a budgetary issue. By making Corman movies with the money to actually create sci-fi worlds, blockbuster filmmaking delivers on their guarantees of excitement and spectacle. But Corman’s most lasting influence on filmmaking in general is in his role as a mentor, in which he brought a resourcefulness and anything-goes spirit that drove the original blockbuster creators of the New Hollywood.

Spielberg and George Lucas might not have worked for Corman early in their careers, but they hung out with Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, who did. The guiding ethos of this new generation of film-school graduates was recreating the film industry in their own image — an image that, for many of them, came from their work with Roger Corman. It’s the spirit Corman evoked in his 2009 acceptance speech for his honorary Academy Award, in which he told a room full of filmmakers, producers, and executives: “It’s very easy for a major studio or somebody else to repeat their successes, to spend vast amounts of money on remakes, on special effects-driven tentpole franchise films. But I believe the finest films being done today are done by the original, innovative filmmakers who have the courage to take a chance and to gamble.”

If blockbuster movies want to continue to dominate the box office for decades to come, studios would do well to keep taking the B-movie maestro’s advice.