Eagle Shooting Heroes, how to offset the budget of another film.

Eagle Shooting Heroes is the ultimate meta comedy, filmed in parallel by Wong Kar Wai with Ashes of Time.

It uses the same cast (Jackie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung etc) to play similar characters but in a satirical manner, making use of their scheduled time and to offset the huge budget of Ashes of Time, resulting in a Chinese New Year classic that has endured over the years.

I guess it's like if Scorsese made a comedy mafia film with the same ensemble heavy weight actors whilst shooting Goodfellas and it became a perennial Christmas classic (or insert your own parallels below in the comments!)