made on a budget of $400,000 or less. The film was shot in Technicolor as "a crucial element in avoiding the supporting-feature fate of Hammer's previous American releases...and to add an extra emphasis to the unprecedented levels of onscreen gore that the film offered as its major attraction." Warner Bros. handled the film's global distribution. It grossed over $3 million around the world in its first year, and its influence on B-budget horror productions such as Corman's Poe adaptations for AIP and Italian films of the early 1960s would soon be evident (see 1960s B movies). Hammer, which had made a deal with Universal to ensure that the American major wouldn't sue for copyright infringement of its 1930s Frankenstein classics, ultimately acquired remake rights to a number of Universal properties. This led to Hammer's Dracula (1958; released in the U.S. as Horror of Dracula), made for £81,412 ($228,768), and The Mummy (1959), both distributed very profitably by Universal. Promoter Joseph E. Levine was the crucial U.S. figure in exploiting the opportunities offered by foreign genre production. In 1956, low-budget producer Richard Kay acquired a Japanese creature feature, Godzilla, for $30,000. Levine financed the shooting of new footage with American actor Raymond Burr that was edited into the film—the total cost to the U.S. partnership was less than $100,000. The Americanized version, Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, was distributed on the East Coast by Levine's Embassy Pictures. Levine himself came up with a string of taglines: "Fantastic beyond comprehension, beyond compare—Astounding beyond belief!", "Terror staggers the mind as the gargantuan creature of the sea surges up on a tidal wave of destruction to wreak vengeance on the Earth!", and many more. Godzilla, King of the Monsters! was a B-market hit, grossing over $2 million in its original run. In 1959, Embassy acquired the worldwide rights to a cheaply made movie starring an American-born bodybuilder as one of the original superheroes. Steve Reeves had appeared in all of two films previously; his debut was in the independent production Jail Bait (1954), directed by Ed Wood On top of a $125,000 purchase price for his import, Levine then spent $1.5 million on advertising and publicity, a virtually unprecedented amount. The New York Times was nonplussed: "Hercules, an Italianmade spectacle film dubbed in English, is the kind of picture that normally would draw little more than yawns in the film market. It would have,