The Asylum

The Asylum is an American film production and distribution company headquartered in Burbank, California, founded in 1997 by David Michael Latt, Sherri Strain and David Rimawi. It built a distinctive business model producing low-budget genre films, many of them "mockbusters" deliberately timed and titled to resemble major studio blockbusters releasing around the same time, alongside original science-fiction and horror properties. Its best-known production is the Sharknado series, whose campy tone and heavy social-media promotion turned a modest cable-television film into a long-running franchise and made the company's name widely recognized well beyond its usual direct-to-video audience.