Skyline and Battle Los Angeles came out within months of each other in the 2010s – much to the disgruntlement of Sony Pictures… Late one February night in 1942, anti-aircraft guns opened fire on a mysterious object in the skies above Los Angeles. The US military, jumpy after the Pearl Harbor attacks two months earlier, ... Skyline and the invasion movie skirmish of the early 2010s
Skyline and Battle Los Angeles came out within months of each other in the 2010s – much to the disgruntlement of Sony Pictures…
Late one February night in 1942, anti-aircraft guns opened fire on a mysterious object in the skies above Los Angeles. The US military, jumpy after the Pearl Harbor attacks two months earlier, feared that it was another surprise attack by the Japanese airforce.
The barrage from the guns caused so much chaos that multiple buildings were damaged by shrapnel, and five people died in connection to the incident; the following day, on the 26th February, the LA Times published photographs of homes and cars punctured by pieces of flying metal; a particularly dramatic image showed spotlights converging on a single point in the night sky.
Years later, it was theorised that the object caught by searchlights that night may have been a weather balloon; among ufologists, the running theory was that it was an alien craft – and that the government had carefully hushed the whole episode up.
After that, aliens repeatedly attacked Los Angeles and other parts of California – albeit in movies. Producer George Pal’s adaptation of The War Of The Worlds (1953) moved HG Wells’ invasion from the UK’s Home Counties to a small town in California. The fictional Santa Mira became the venue for a much quieter alien takeover in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956). An extra-terrestrial big-game hunter descended on a sweaty Los Angeles in Predator 2 (1990).
Read more: 10 classic sci-fi films of the 1950s
Things began to look really bad for the residents of Los Angeles in 2010, though, when two rival invasion movies emerged within months of each other – prompting a minor legal battle in the real world.
First came Skyline, an invasion thriller directed by Greg and Colin Strause. A pair of visual effects specialists, the brothers had cut their teeth producing VFX shots for multiple high-profile films, including the iceberg sequences in James Cameron’s Titanic and apocalyptic scenes in The Day After Tomorrow, for which they won a BAFTA. The pair had also garnered awards for their music videos, and were owners of their own effects studio, Hydraulx, based in Santa Monica.
The Brothers Strause, as they called themselves, looked all primed to make the jump to feature filmmaking, which they did with their 2007 directorial debut, Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem. Immediately notorious for its murky lighting and mean-spirited tone, the action-horror spin-off made money but was critically panned; in later interviews, the brothers described the experience of making the film as a “constant battle” with executives at what was then 20th Century Fox.
“There’s all the things we wanted on the last movie and there was this constant battle,” Colin Strause told Cinema Blend in 2010. “You’re fighting these guys whose whole job is to tell you no. They’re not there to say ‘yes’ to everything. They actually have a corporate mentality to put a cage around you because you’re this crazy creative fucking guy who is really dangerous to the studios… They wear you down, even if it’s two stubborn guys. They will wear you down, and eventually that hurts what goes up on screen… We just wanted to wipe that out. We couldn’t stand having that happen again.”
A film released the same year as Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem gave the somewhat bruised Strause brothers a valuable flash of inspiration, however – Paranormal Activity. Here was a low-budget horror film, made in one location with cheap consumer cameras; directed for a grand sum of $200,000 once post-production was factored in, it was a $194m hit, and transformed the fortunes of independent studio Blumhouse Productions.
As Greg Strause told Dread Central, “We were sitting around looking at the incredible buzz and box office numbers from a movie that was shot on what looked to me to be a consumer level camera in someone’s house, and we were like, ‘Well, I just finished remodeling my place and it looks cool, and we happen to own digital cinema cameras… We own Arriflex lenses, which are the same cameras Fincher just shot his movie with…”
The pair then began developing an idea they could make on a low budget and control themselves – without studio executives breathing down their necks. Together with friends Joshua Cordes and Liam O’Donnell, the latter pair responsible for the script, they came up with an alien invasion concept they could film in and around Greg’s own apartment in Marina Del Rey.
Their VFX expertise meant that they could produce the effects shots themselves through their company, Hydraulx; they also owned their own lights and filming equipment, reducing rental costs; and using Greg’s flat meant that they essentially had a free location to shoot in.
With those creative parameters in mind, Cordes and O’Donnell wrote a script in which a small group of characters view an attacking alien armada through gaps in blinds or on television, with the action spilling out into the street outside nearer the third act.
The brothers began shooting Skyline in February 2010, with a cast including 24’s Eric Balfour, Scrubs’ Donald Faison and NCIS’s Scottie Thompson. The shoot was partly self-financed to the tune of around $3.5m, with the rest of the $10-20m budget coming from pre-sales; the filmmakers later said that the shoot itself was pulled off for just $500,000, and the rest of the cash was spent on VFX.
To handle the alien designs, the brothers turned to Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr at Amalgamated Dynamics, with whom they’d previously worked on the ill-fated Requiem. Other than that, much of Skyline’s production and post-production was handled in-house – quite literally. Some greenscreen shots were filmed in Greg Strause’s garage.
The filmmakers’ industry connections also came in handy as their film neared completion. Making a movie independently is one thing; without a studio backing, how do you get it in cinemas? The pair knew the (since disgraced) director Brett Ratner, who watched Skyline and was impressed enough to recommend it to film financier Ryan Kavanaugh, who owned Relativity Media.
Kavanaugh in turn decided to release through Rogue, a distributor once owned by Universal but purchased by Relativity in 2009. As part of that deal, films released through Rogue were marketed and put in cinemas by Universal; in short, the independently-made Skyline became a studio film – complete with a $20m marketing budget – via the back door.
“The fact that it turned into a studio movie is just kind of wild,” Colin Strause told Den Of Geek around the time of Skyline’s release in November 2010. “Most independent movies, they go to festivals, they maybe get a 500 screen release, if they’re lucky. The fact that we had huge support from Universal for Comic-Con. You know, it’s on over 3,000 screens. So, it’s gonna be a big release… And it’s a little unheard of, actually. I can’t really think of another independent movie like this type of scale that happened this quick and got released on this many screens. It’s a pretty unique situation.”
As Universal began Skyline’s marketing campaign in 2010, however, the film came to the attention of Sony Pictures. It had been working on its own alien invasion movie – one made with a much larger budget and one or two bankable names: Battle: Los Angeles, starring Aaron Eckhart and Michelle Rodriguez. Work had begun on that film in the late 2000s, but expensive Hollywood productions being the lumbering beasts that they were, it wasn’t set to emerge until the spring of 2011.
There was another connection between it and Skyline beyond sharing a similar premise: Battle Los Angeles’ VFX were being at least partly produced by Hydraulx – the company owned by the Brothers Strause. Sony was sufficiently irked that it got its lawyers involved, with Deadline reporting in August 2010 that the studio was asking itself whether Hydraulx should have told Sony that it was already working on a similar invasion movie.
“That gave Hydraulx access to proprietary information that included script drafts, storyboards, and pre-viz animatics,” the outlet wrote at the time. “The Strause brothers had already seen the Battle: Los Angeles script, I’m told, because they were considered as potential directors.”
The Strause brothers conceded in their interview with Dread Central that they had been approached to direct Battle: Los Angeles, but had passed because “we weren’t interested in it… because we’ve done it before. It’s just a bigger version of some of the stuff that we already did in AVP:R. We’re looking to do something different now. What’s the new thing? […] We wanted to show that we’re not just whiz-bang FX guys. There’s actually a cool story in Skyline, and we have some pretty solid set-pieces as well.”
Aside from that subtle dig at Battle: Los Angeles itself, the brothers also argued that Sony had an ‘ulterior motive’ for the allegations: Sony simply wanted to use its studio clout to force a smaller, rival film into shifting release dates.
“Our consistent statement is that this is all about Sony trying to muscle the little guy into a different release date,” Greg Strause said.
“This kind of ‘parallel thinking’ thing is always happening in Hollywood,” Colin added, citing 90s rivals Deep Impact versus Armageddon and Dante’s Peak versus Volcano as other examples. “There are always movies that seem similar which happen to be made at the same time. It’s almost like a zeitgeist of the time. The thing everyone has to remember is that we’ve done an invasion movie with the military in armored vehicles getting wiped out by aliens before.”
Skyline arrived in cinemas in November 2010, and compared to its budget, was a respectable success, making $68m. Reviews were mixed, but the film certainly delivered on the scale promised in its trailer; the acting and dialogue was shaky, but the imagery – particularly that of countless Los Angeles residents being swept up by giant alien spacecraft – really did look impressive for a moderately low-budget film.
Directed by Jonathan Liebesman, Battle: Los Angeles came out in March 2011, and with a larger $70m budget, it was able to stage much bigger action sequences than its rival. Depicting a street-level war between US soldiers and humanoid aliens, it certainly looked like a mid-level blockbuster, though it also had markedly less personality than Skyline; the alien designs were less interesting, and the film had the washed-out look of PlayStation 3-era videogames.
As a percentage of its budget, Sony’s film wasn’t more profitable than Skyline, either: it took $212m in cinemas. Not a bad amount, but hardly a storming success, either.
In the aftermath, Sony rowed back on its legal threats over Skyline and Hydraulx. A statement released that March stated that the studio had “dismissed its arbitration” against Hydraulx, and was “satisfied” that the studio’s effects were not used in Skyline.”
Deadline also added that the case was allegedly brought about because Neal Moritz, Battle: Los Angeles’ producer, was “angry at the time”. Cooler heads evidently prevailed as both films came out and did not dissimilar business; certainly, it didn’t look as though one had cannibalised ticket sales from the other, as Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove had from its rival Failsafe decades earlier.
Besides, Skyline wasn’t the only alien invasion competitor to emerge around that time.
Battle: Los Angeles was loosely based on that 1942 incident mentioned above; there’s even brief mention of it in the movie, along with a glimpse of the LA Times’ photo of searchlights crossing the night sky. Low-budget production company The Asylum got wind of Sony’s project, and rushed out its own rival movie, also based on those 1942 events.
The cheekily-titled Battle Of Los Angeles appeared on the Syfy channel on the 12th March 2010 – the day after Battle: Los Angeles. This time, Sony let the whole thing slide without making a public comment.
As the whole episode was forgotten about, it was Skyline that ultimately emerged as the victor, of sorts. Sony murmured half-heartedly about making a sequel to Battle: LA, but never got around to it.
Skyline, meanwhile, spawned its own mini-franchise, with Beyond Skyline coming out in 2017, Skylines emerging three years after, and Skyline: Warpath due out at some point this year.
The weird alien invasion movie skirmish of the early 2010s came and went without incident. Skyline’s legacy, somewhat improbably, still endures.
