Best Meager Movies & TV Shows

Toxic waste has contaminated the world's fresh water supply. A select few with the ability to de-contaminate the supply now control the world. Minna rules the de-contaminators from a giant warship, forcing desperate land dwellers to trade anything and everything for meager water rations. The dwellers seek a leader to battle Minna's tyrannical rule. Jennifer, daughter of the rebel leader, implores outcast Mike Erikson to lead the battle against the warship. Help also comes from an unexpected source in the from of Jennifer's brother Rocky.

During a manned mission to Mars, Astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead after a fierce storm and left behind by his crew. But Watney has survived and finds himself stranded and alone on the hostile planet. With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive.

In the early twentieth century, Russo-Japanese War veteran Saichi “Immortal” Sugimoto scratches out a meager existence during the postwar gold rush in the wilderness of Hokkaido. When he stumbles across a map to a fortune in hidden Ainu gold, he sets off on a treacherous quest to find it. But Sugimoto is not the only interested party, and everyone who knows about the gold will kill to possess it! Faced with the harsh conditions of the northern wilderness, ruthless criminals and rogue Japanese soldiers, Sugimoto will need all his skills and luck—and the help of an Ainu girl named Asirpa—to survive.

A reality show contest where sixteen or more castaways split between two or more “Tribes” are taken to a remote isolated location and are forced to live off the land with meager supplies for roughly 39 days. Frequent physical challenges are used to pit the tribes against each other for rewards, such as food or luxuries, or for “Immunity”, forcing the other tribe to attend “Tribal Council”, where they must vote off one of their players.

Anne Elliot, the daughter of a financially troubled aristocratic family, is persuaded to break her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a young sea captain of meager means. Years later, money troubles force Anne's father to rent out the family estate to Admiral Croft, and Anne is again thrown into company with Frederick -- who is now rich, successful, and perhaps still in love with Anne.

The inspiring true story of Dream Alliance, an unlikely race horse bred by small town bartender, Jan Vokes. With very little money and no experience, Jan convinces her neighbors to chip in their meager earnings to help raise Dream and compete with the racing elites. Their investment pays off as Dream rises through the ranks and becomes a beacon of hope in their struggling community.

The amazing, true story of a Uruguayan rugby team's plane that crashed in the middle of the Andes mountains, and their immense will to survive and pull through alive, forced to do anything and everything they could to stay alive on meager rations and through the freezing cold.

Set in the year 2024 in post-apocalyptic America, 18-year old Vic and his telepathic dog, Blood, are scavengers in the desolate wilderness ravaged by World War IV, where survivors must battle for food and shelter in the desert-like wasteland. Vic and Blood eke out a meager existence, foraging for food and fighting gangs of cutthroats.

A man goes to a loan shark to finance his family's vacation.

Ben (Glenn Ford) and Marion (Henry Fonda) are two cowboys who make a meager living breaking wild horses. Their frequent employer Jim (Chill Wills), who always gets the better of them, talks them into taking a nondescript horse in lieu of some of their wages. Ben finds that the horse is un-rideable, he comes up with the idea of taking it to a rodeo and betting other cowhands they cannot ride it.

Kildare tries brain surgery, advised by Dr. Gillespie, and faces a rival for nurse Lamont.

When he discovers that an Indian casino is about to be built over the town's historic battlefield, Chase Revere, the self-appointed protector of a small town's rather meager place in American history, joins forces with sexy but dangerous town siren Lucy Shanks to launch an all-out offensive against the project - earning the wrath of the entire town.

Heather and her friends have some devilish fun on the social website, ConnectMeNet. However, their amusement has come at the expense of a lonely and medicated half-wit, Jerry Tobin. After goading him into humiliating himself on camera in various cruel acts of depravity, they post the clips online for the world to see in a video titled "Revenge on a Creeper". This ruins Jerry's meager life and he disappears without a trace... Fast forward a year, and the tables are now turned when Jerry reemerges, off the antipsychotic medication that clouded his thoughts and kept his demons at bay. Now the girls are forced into a nightmarish fight for their lives!

Part 2 of the Virgil Bliss trilogy, Bliss picks up Virgil's story 20 years later in the deserts of Southern California where a fugitive Virgil scratches out a meager existence as an Oxy-addicted stable hand.

Against the backdrop of a sprawling half-constructed tower block in Tbilisi, Viktor, a local celebrity drag queen, and Tarzan, a drifting teenager, search for fleeting possibilities of intimacy in the vestiges of a collapsing world. Playing out meager tasks of survival in a restricted not so far future, Viktor and Tarzan slowly come to understand their environment as a vestibule of the afterlife.

Cattle buyer Rex Allen rides into Taskerville and sees two men toss Slim Pickens, a water diviner hired by the local ranchers, into a wagon. Rex chases the wagon to the barn of rancher Lem Shaver, where he learns from Slim that Russ Tasker, a wealthy rancher and owner of the only artesian-fed reservoir in the valley, has charged such high prices for water that the ranchers are bankrupt. Tasker's henchmen kill rancher Matt Becker and have his son Johnny branded as an outlaw. Rex learns that the Beckers had found a meager water supply and Rex suspects that is what led to the killing and the charges against Johnny. With the aid of Slim and Johnny's sweetheart, Sue, Rex finds that the Becker spring is fed from the same underground lake that feeds Tasker's well-guarded reservoir. But Rex is jailed for aiding Johnny.

Kid, an anonymous young man who ekes out a meager living in an underground fight club where, night after night, wearing a gorilla mask, he is beaten bloody by more popular fighters for cash. After years of suppressed rage, Kid discovers a way to infiltrate the enclave of the city’s sinister elite. As his childhood trauma boils over, his mysteriously scarred hands unleash an explosive campaign of retribution to settle the score with the men who took everything from him.