Action
From Fast and Furious knock offs and Expendables-style exotic country invasions to drug wars and downtown street fighters, action genre has been one of the most commercially predictable niches through the years for highly successful micro budget film producers.
Pet
movies
A sweet all family genre, producing solid demand from cable brands like Lifetime. Key elements of the most popular micro budget children’s movie model involves a blond girl reconnecting with her family or overcoming a personal obstacle through a pet. Such movies are constantly in demand by cable brands like Lifetime.
Creature
movies
Micro budget creature movies have become a cult on its own, being responsible for the rise of most successful b-movie studios. It has been said that mockbusters and b-movies offer escapism to the viewers as well as being one of the strongest vehicles making the audiences accept the slightly over-the-top cheap special effects is humour and this is an ideal medium for all sorts of slap stick and cliché jokes which can make anybody laugh.
Sci-fi
action
Beginning with the early days of brands like Transformers, cartoons serving the young generation of millennials, the sci-fi action genre has been one of the highest genres in demand with generation Z.
Epic
fantasy
movies
With a long legacy of big entertainment brands like War Princess Xena, Lord of the Rings, Thor and Game Of Thrones, epic fantasy is a genre that will be in demand for a long time, serving millennials and generation Z on all video on demand platforms.
Teen
sex
comedies
A genre kicked off by cult classics like American Pie, and followed by box office hits like Project X, teen sex comedies is a theme that is going to keep on serving young male audiences for years to come.
Thrillers
A great evergreen genre with a couple of sub-genres serving mostly female audiences for cable brands like Lifetime, Fox Life, Fox Crime and Sony Pictures Television. It often involves female lead characters, romance, family members in danger or obsessive lovers and stalkers.
Christian
movies
This genre, in its core nature does not require large budgets to produce high quality content, often with good reviews on IMDB and Rotten Tomatos which is exceptional for micro budget movies with commercial appeal. Thus making it a great opportunity for producers to profit from a highly underserved audience segment.
Inspirational
movies
This is a neighbouring niche to Christian movies. Main subject line is to enforce family values and tell stories which have moral lessons. This sub-genre provides filmmakers with an opportunity to produce something at low budgets, but high quality, while contributing something valuable to the target audience.
Disaster
movies
Survivalism is a very strong commercial niche in US, whether it's in ecommerce products or the media industry. In the film industry, big movie productions like Perfect Storm, Into the Storm and many others have paved the way for this long lasting predictable trend cycle, that is highly allied with big Hollywood releases and their marketing campaigns.
LGBT
movies
LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. This has been a rising micro budget movie niche has been providing filmmakers and investors with high ROIs while requiring small budgets for production.
Zombie
movies
Zombies has been a great subject for many movies and games for the past 10 years. With the market getting a bit more saturated and new trends like sci-fi action are taking over, it will always be a solid ROI producing category for commercial micro budgets, picking up new profitable sub-niches inside the genre empowered by hit TV series like Walking Dead.
Animation
Hollywood animation studios are constantly releasing high quality movies with huge marketing budgets creating audiences of kids who just can't get enough of talking cars or fighting pandas. Creating a great opportunity for independent animation producers to outsource productions of similarly themed mockbusters to cheaper production countries.
Christmas
movies
This is a mix of heart-warming children's pet movies, Home Alone style slap stick comedies and addictive romance movies made to run on female audience targeted cable channels during holidays. A great seasonal niche that has been around and will be around forever in western countries, the lifecycle of such movies can be very long producing profits each Christmas.
Horror
As long as b-movies have been around there has been the horror genre - a highly commercial b-movie model that has launched many successful independent production companies.