This was the first of many Asylum Studio "mockbuster" rip-off films that cash in on more popular movies, though this film did not start off that way. The script was originally written in 1997 by Carlos De Los Rios. Titled The Invasion, the film was to be a modern-day loose adaptation of H.G. Wells's War Of The Worlds, featuring two brothers (one a scientist and the other a solider) going on a cross-country quest to find their families amid a full-scale alien invasion. The script interested many big studios and the two brothers were to be played by
C. Thomas Howell and
Tom Cruise, but the project fell through due to budgetary concerns. Years later, De Los Rios took his script to The Asylum and planned to make it there, but when they heard that Spielberg was working on his own version of War Of The Worlds with Cruise in the lead, the creators felt discouraged and decided to retool the script to cash in on his project. Director
David Michael Latt said in an interview "We were doing it first...I think they knew about [the production] and never cared to reach out to us, so this was our way of giving them the middle finger." When the cash-in marketing proved to be a huge success, The Asylum started intentionally making more mockbusters and knock-offs as and used this film as a business model. Other elements, such as the musical score and effects created specifically for this movie, would go on to be recycled in countless Asylum productions.
