Famous Movies That Started as Short Films
A three-act script and a huge studio budget aren’t always the first steps on the road to Hollywood success. Even the biggest films can begin very small.
Short films have long served as a calling card for filmmakers with big ideas but little funding, producing small proof-of-concept films that show what they can accomplish with the right kind of support. In ways that have altered the course of history, these short films have launched careers, won over skeptic producers, and occasionally gone viral.
Making the switch from short to feature has become a valid way to get into the business. This is a list of 14 well-known films that began as shorts before being released on the big screen.
Whiplash
Damien Chazelle had already written his script but couldn’t get anyone to take it seriously, so he turned 15 pages into an 18-minute short in 2013. The short premiered at Sundance and won the Jury Award, with J.K. Simmons delivers the same terrifying performance as abusive music instructor Fletcher that would later earn him an Oscar.
The feature version premiered at Sundance the following year and walked away with three Academy Awards, proving that sometimes you need to show rather than tell.
Saw
James Wan and Leigh Whannell shot their nine-minute pitch in just two days with almost no money, using it to convince studios that their gruesome concept could work. They screened it for producers at Evolution Entertainment, who immediately offered them $1.2 million to make the full version.
That modest investment turned into a franchise worth over $1 billion across eight films, making it one of the most profitable horror series in cinema history.
District 9
Neill Blomkamp created a six-minute mockumentary called Alive in Joburg to showcase his vision for documentary-style alien storytelling. Peter Jackson saw it and hired Blomkamp to direct the Halo adaptation, but when that project collapsed, Blomkamp reworked ideas from his short into District 9.
The film earned a Best Picture nomination at the 2010 Academy Awards and launched Blomkamp’s career as a major science fiction director.
Fatal Attraction
James Dearden’s 1980 short film Diversion caught the attention of Paramount Pictures, who commissioned him to expand it seven years later. The resulting thriller became 1987’s second highest-grossing film in the United States and earned six Academy Award nominations.
What started as a modest short about an affair gone wrong became a cultural phenomenon that people still reference decades later.
Lights Out
David F. Sandberg created his horror short for a film competition in 2013, and though it didn’t win, the two-and-a-half-minute film went viral online. James Wan saw it and offered to produce a feature version, impressed by how effectively Sandberg built terror around a creature that only appears in darkness.
The 2016 feature grossed $148 million against a budget of under $5 million, proving that a simple concept executed brilliantly can resonate with massive audiences.
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp released their first four-minute stop-motion short in 2010, featuring an anthropomorphic shell with a googly eye and tiny shoes. The charming mockumentary became a viral hit, leading to two more shorts and a bestselling picture book.
Eleven years after the first short, they expanded Marcel’s story into a 90-minute feature that premiered in 2021 and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature.
Mama
Argentinian filmmaker Andrés Muschietti created a three-minute horror short in 2008 that caught the attention of Guillermo del Toro, who called it one of the scariest short films he’d ever seen. Del Toro agreed to produce a feature version, which took five years to develop.
The 2013 film starring Jessica Chastain earned nearly $150 million worldwide against a $15 million budget, launching Muschietti’s career and eventually leading him to direct the massively successful IT adaptations.
Good Will Hunting
Matt Damon wrote an early version of his screenplay as a college assignment at Harvard, originally envisioning it as a much shorter thriller. His professor recognized the potential and encouraged him to expand it beyond a simple one-act piece.
Damon has said that only one scene from his original short version made it verbatim into the final film the first meeting between Will and therapist Sean Maguire, played by Robin Williams in his Oscar-winning performance.
Frankenweenie
Tim Burton created a live-action short in 1984 while working at Disney, telling the story of a boy who brings his dog back to life. Disney executives found it too dark and let Burton go, but 28 years later they welcomed him back to remake it as a stop-motion animated feature.
The 2012 version gave Burton the creative freedom he’d been denied decades earlier, featuring voice work from Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, and Martin Short.
9
Shane Acker spent four and a half years creating his Oscar-nominated animated short while studying at UCLA. The 11-minute film about sentient rag dolls in a post-apocalyptic world impressed Tim Burton so much that he agreed to produce a feature-length adaptation.
The 2009 feature expanded on Acker’s dark vision, though many fans still consider the original short to be the purer, more focused version of the story.
THX 1138
George Lucas made a short called Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB while studying at USC in 1967, envisioning a sterile future built from existing locations rather than elaborate sets. He remade it as his first feature film four years later, long before he would create a certain galaxy far, far away.
The film’s cold, dystopian aesthetic showed early signs of Lucas’s ability to craft fully realized worlds, even on limited budgets.
Short Term 12
Destin Daniel Cretton created a 22-minute short as part of his master’s degree at San Diego State University, drawing from his own experiences working at a facility for troubled teenagers. The short won the Jury Prize at Sundance and earned Cretton a prestigious screenwriting fellowship, giving him the resources to expand it into a 2013 feature.
The film launched the careers of Brie Larson and several other young actors while exploring the challenges faced by both residents and staff at group homes.
Office Space
Mike Judge created an animated short about a disgruntled office worker named Milton who can’t stop mumbling about his stapler. The character appeared in a series of SNL segments in the early 1990s before Judge adapted the concept into his 1999 live-action comedy.
While the feature expanded far beyond Milton’s story to encompass broader workplace frustrations, the stapler-obsessed character remained one of the film’s most memorable elements.
Smile
Parker Finn’s short film Laura Hasn’t Slept won the Special Jury Award at the 2020 SXSW Film Festival, catching the attention of Paramount Pictures. The studio picked it up and gave Finn the chance to direct a feature expansion, which became one of 2022’s surprise horror hits.
The film grossed over $217 million worldwide, proving that even in the age of streaming, a well-crafted theatrical horror experience can still pack theaters.
From Proof of Concept to Box Office Gold
From being a filmmaking exercise, the short film has developed into a valid industry tool. With filmmakers like Parker Finn and David Sandberg using shorts to start their careers, what worked in the 1990s when Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino were making their debuts still works today.
Spending a few thousand dollars to demonstrate your vision is more cost-effective than attempting to persuade doubters with a script for years. These 14 movies demonstrate that sometimes the shortest route to success is the short film itself, which gives viewers just enough to make them fall in love before giving them the whole story they weren’t aware they needed.
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