Some studios stop abiding by the laws, and are better for it (Indie Produced Films)

With this weekend seeing the “Paranormal Activity” train roll on and “Law Abiding Citizen” overperforming for Overture, a curious mini-trend is taking hold: studios are going into the finished-film rough and coming out with gems.

Or, put another way, studios are creating hits by doing exactly the opposite of what their machinery is designed to do: develop from within.

Both Paramount and Overture, the respective distributors behind those two weekend winners, acquired rights to their  films after the pics were pretty much through production by their indie producers (at a fraction of the price than it would have cost to make them). With “District 9,” the in-production diamond Sony unearthed last year and turned into $100+ million in boxoffice bling, that means three of the biggest sleepers of the year were all developed outside the studio system and only released within it.

That may not seem like a tectonic shift. But with every passing weekend at the box-office — a bargain acquisition breaks out here, a studio-developed pic flops there — the balance of power moves slightly away from the development world and toward acquisitions and marketing.

That balance will never move too far in the other direction; studios still have plenty of investment in and infrastructure for development. But with this hat trick, it’s now fair to ask if there’s at least a new model creeping in to rival the old one, a model in which development and production are, in essence, outsourced.

The move to acquire in-production and finished pics, after all, dovetails nicely with a few other studio trends. The biggies around town are already cutting back on development, as they slash budgets, producer deals, blind writer deals, etc.

There is, at the same time, a sudden abundance of available commercial pics, thanks to a shift on the independent financing side. Over the past year there have been a number of financiers willing to fund low-budget genre movies instead of what they once happily financed — star-driven dramatic ones.

In other words, there’s a lot more out there that might interest the studios than there was even a year ago.

Maybe most importantly, at a time when penny-pinching studios are trying, for better or worse, to stamp the risk out of the business (see under: The Remake Craze), the opportunity to watch a film before one decides to invest in it may be most appealing of all. And if that pic is a star-less one with a good concept — meaning it’s marketable but can be bought at a price — all the better.

There’s no guarantee that any of the other titles studios have bought or will buy will break out similarly; “Paranormal Activity,” with a low budget even by low-budget standards, is certainly an anomaly.

But if nothing else, the weekend shows that it may be the right time to start handicapping other prospects, whether it’s the dark superhero high-school tale “Kick-Ass” (acquired for a few million by Lionsgate several months ago, after it was finished), the deluded superhero tale “Defendor” (acquired by Sony, “District 9″ style, for a similarly low price out of Toronto), or the high-concept underwater adventure “Sanctum” (which Relativity and Universal teamed to buy for just above $10m, and which as a 3D pic with Jim Cameron’s imprimatur, has many of the right earmarks).

One consequence of all this is that the upcoming American Film Market, where Sony of course picked up “District 9″ last year, may have a different feel. The Santa Monica gathering usually conjures as much excitement as a trip to a used-car dealership. This year may up the intrigue level.

More broadly, with all the other changes creasing the movie business, you can add this wrinkle. Indies are now making commercial movies, and the commercial world is following an indie approach. Things truly are paranormal.