(Photo Credit: Blumhouse)
As the spooky season approaches, one movie studio showed up at New York Comic Con to bring the house down. Blumhouse has been championing original horror movies for years, with their low-budget, creative freedom approach kicking off with the enormously successful Paranormal Activity. Since then, they’ve helped launch films like Insidious, Whiplash, Get Out, Sinister, The Purge, and this year’s Speak No Evil.
With a new year comes a new BlumFest, a panel where CEO Jason Blum brings in a few of the creative minds behind Blumhouse’s upcoming horror films to give us a sneak peek at what’s to come. But first, we had to catch up with the company’s founder, who has been producing these films since the turn of the 21st century.
Although Blum is now one of the most respected names in horror, he recalled a time when he needed to fight to get one movie made. “Paranormal Activity,” he recalls. “No one returned my calls for three years. I had no clout. Now, if I say a movie’s good, no one will buy it, but at least they’ll watch it. When I did Paranormal Activity, they wouldn’t even watch the movie. For three years, I tried, I begged people to watch the film. They would not see the film. I had to sell the remake rights to get people to actually watch the film in front of an audience. That’s why I never turned back. I only made horror movies ever since then because that moment was so such a big moment in my life.”
Blumhouse will learn from disappointments
Paranormal Activity grossed $194.2 million worldwide against a $15,000 production budget, with critics praising the film. Although he’s had his fair share of critical successes, like M3GAN and The Black Phone, some movies have missed the mark. This year, critics were less kind to films like Night Swim, Imaginary, and Afraid, and Blum had candid words for whenever his movies don’t perform as well as he hoped.
“I get very sad about it,” Blum said. “I take it very personally. I get very emotional about it. I always believe in our children, so when they don’t work, or the audience doesn’t like them, I take it very personally. I debrief. Then I have a big moment in the company after it happens where I say, ‘Why didn’t this movie work?’ I don’t pretend that it worked or say, ‘Well, we almost got a single’ or whatever. I say, ‘This movie did not work. Why not? And how do we not repeat the same mistakes?’ So the first is sadness, then learning. And then you gotta dust off your pants. You gotta get in there again and get excited again. If you start moping around, it’s not fun to work there. So I go through those three phases. Every time I allow myself to be sad, then I allow myself to learn, and then I allow myself to move on.”
“You gotta think about this next one and try not to repeat the same mistakes,” he says, exemplifying his CEO mentality. “But it’s the worst part about the business. People say, ‘do you want to retire?’ I say, ‘When things are not going well, I wanna retire. And when things are going great, I want to work forever.’”
Jason Blum addresses AI backlash
Blum then commented on Blumhouse’s recent partnership with Meta Movie Gen, which Deadline described as “a suite of AI models that show how you can use simple text inputs to produce custom videos and sounds, edit existing videos, and transform a personal image into a unique video.” This announcement comes when AI is looming large over the entertainment industry, leading to mixed reactions as some audience members are concerned that AI-generated art can take away opportunities from creative professionals.
“We had a ton of negative press around that and a ton of negative reaction,” Blum admits. “My point of view is we are a company that enables artists. Artists always come first, and artists want tools. And to me, it would be irresponsible if we didn’t at least know about the tools. And I think also for me, it would be irresponsible to not learn about the tools. So I know nothing about AI, but I wanted to do this to learn. So, we worked with three filmmakers to make these little shorts so that we could learn about it. So when a filmmaker asks me about AI and ‘Can I do effects with AI, or what can I do or what can’t I do,’ I at least want to be able to have a reasonable answer before I bury my head in the sand, and that was why I did it.”
“I don’t really have a feeling one way or another generally about AI,” Blum says. “I think it’s 50% good and 50% horrible. But I wanna understand because one thing for sure, it’s here to stay. So I wanna understand it, and I don’t understand it yet, and I need to understand it. And this is one of the ways that I’m trying to understand it.”
What to expect from M3GAN 2.0
Perhaps one way Blum has been trying to understand AI is by incorporating it into his horror films. One recent example is the 2023 film M3GAN, a movie about an AI-powered killer doll that received rave reviews and earned $181 million worldwide against a $12 million budget. This movie was such a massive success that it has spawned a planned sequel, M3GAN 2.0, and a planned spin-off, SOULM8TE. Actress Allison Williams, known for her memorable roles in Get Out and the first M3GAN, stopped by New York Comic Con to share whatever she could about the upcoming film.
“The effects of the first movie are very clear on Gemma as the second movie starts, and I think that’s kind of all I can say is that it’s very clear that she lived through the things that we saw her live through in the first movie, and she has adjusted life accordingly,” Williams said. She hopes audiences respond to the sequel with “enthusiasm” and shared her thoughts on portraying the uniquely campy tone that the first film had.
“In this franchise, my job is kind of playing it very straight and keeping it kind of real so that the audience can kind of relate to my experience,” Williams said. “Although, there are other characters who are also the cipher for the audience occasionally. Yeah, it’s playing it straight, but also, when you’re in the horror genre, you have to have big reactions to things, and the stakes are really high, and everything’s heightened. And so it’s also a game of pushing yourself to an 11, and then with me, that’s still gonna be kind of grounded. Like, I don’t really have that really big performance that I like to do in these movies. So yeah, it’s kind of a dance in that way.”
Although she has starred in two famous horror movies, Williams needs the perfect conditions to watch horror movies on her own. “It really takes it out of me. I have to really prepare myself. It has to be day; it has to be on a plane,” she says. Looking beyond the horror genre, Williams shared what else she wanted to do with her career. “I’ve wanted to be on a horse in a corset with a candle. Like, I wanna go way back in time. Like deep historical fiction, maybe.”
Drop reunites Christopher Landon & Blumhouse
Also on Blumhouse’s theatrical slate next year is Drop, a horror film about a woman played by Meghann Fahy, who goes on a date and suddenly finds herself getting AirDropped creepy memes. She soon finds that her family is being held hostage by a killer who forces her into a high-stakes game of life and death. This film is directed by Christopher Landon, who previously helmed Happy Death Day and Freaky for Blumhouse, along with writing most of the Paranormal Activity movies.
“It sort of fits in the classic thriller realm, which I think is very exciting and it’s super fast paced,” says Fahy. “Definitely will keep you on the edge of your seat. You don’t know what’s coming next.”
“It’s intense, fast,” says Landon. “You know what it is. It’s like Hitchcock had a baby with a nineties thriller and modern technology. That’s the vibe…it’s everyday technology that we all use and deal with and I think that’s what makes the movie so scary because you see how that type of technology can be weaponized and used against someone. Tone-wise, it’s definitely a departure. I think for me, or I was saying earlier, a bit of a return to my sort of old Disturbia days if anyone even knows that reference. I mean I think it’s decidedly more serious in tone, but I also think that there’s still room for humor. Yeah. I think that still shines, definitely.”
Landon also shared an update on the long-awaited Happy Death Day sequel that has been discussed but has not been given the green light. “You are talking to the wrong guy,” he jokes when asked about Happy Death Day 3. “The guy who has no power, who has no control over anything in his life or outside of it. I would do it in a heartbeat, but it’s a Jason Blum/Universal [decision]. It’s up to the people with the money.”
Wolf Man hopes to scare audiences
Perhaps one of the biggest debuts at BlumFest was the new trailer for Wolf Man, an upcoming Universal Monsters movie directed by Leigh Whannell, who previously directed films like Insidious: Chapter 3, Upgrade, and The Invisible Man. This upcoming movie has had a long development period, with Whannell being attached at first and then leaving the project. At one point, the film was going to be a joint venture between Ryan Gosling and Derek Cianfrance, who had previously collaborated on Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines. However, they left the project, and Whannell returned as co-writer and director.
“My idea for the Wolf Man didn’t really change much,” Whannell recalls. “My initial concept, like, I remember pacing around in my backyard thinking like, ‘all right, what am I gonna do with this movie? If I’m doing this, what am I doing?’ And there was this light bulb moment of like, ‘oh, it’s this.’ And I talked about it with my wife, Corbett. We ended up co-writing the film together. She was excited, like she loves horror movies, but she’s usually a pretty good critic of my ideas. She’ll be like, ‘ah, what about, you know,’ which is good. With this one, she was like, ‘oh, I love that.’ And then she ended up co-writing it with me. So then it went through various writers. I stepped off the project, then I came back onto it. And even though it changed, eventually when it got back to me, I stuck with that same idea that I’d had in the backyard. It never really wavered from that initial idea.”
Whannell hopes that audiences will connect with the film. “I hope that they love it,” he says. “I hope they’re scared. I hope that they’re emotional about it. So, I want it to be a tragedy. I want it to be emotional. I also want it to scare the shit out of them. You know, I want people to see it in theaters. I mean, that’s the eternal question these days is how do you get people into theaters? You know, how do you turn something into a phenomenon? You know, like, it’s tough. It’s tough to make a Top Gun or a Barbie, you know, these, these movies that really get moviegoers into theaters. It’s getting to be a smaller target than ever. So I really hope Wolf Man connects on that level.”
Wolf Man is his second Universal Monsters movie after The Invisible Man in 2020. When asked if he’d make any more Universal Monster films, he said, “I don’t know. You know what, at the moment, no, it’s not that I’m not interested; it’s just that a lot of times, you just have to let the movie find you. Because I write my own films, it takes a long time for me to get into that zone of like, ‘yes, I’m excited about this.’ You know, I can’t lie to myself as a writer, and I’m not relying on other writers to come up with the idea for me. So I’m starting back at zero every time. And so that’s kind of where I am now. I’m just thinking about the things that interest me. What would I wanna see in a theater? And I’m thinking a lot about what works in a theater. That’s not something I used to think about 10-15 years ago. I just took it for granted that if you made a film, it would get a theatrical release. Yeah. Now, in 2024-2025, I have to actually sit down and think about what plays in a theater. You know, otherwise, I think if you don’t build that into the screenplay, you’re in danger of just being a streaming movie, which is fine, but it’s not what I wanna do right now.”
Whannel reflects on Saw’s legacy
This month also marks an anniversary for Whannell. October 29, 2024, marks the 20-year anniversary of the 2004 movie Saw. Whannell was a writer on the first three Saw movies and starred as Adam, the protagonist of the original film. He reflected on the long-standing legacy of the first film’s shocking ending.
“You know when I wrote that first Saw movie, and I was working in conjunction with James Wan, we were back in Australia, [and] both of us knew we had something special,” he recalls. “Now, we didn’t necessarily know it was gonna be some big box office success, but we knew that anyone who saw it would react. There’s no better feeling in the world to be like, ‘oh, I’m sitting on top of something right now. I have a secret.’ And when I was writing the ending, it was just flowing outta my fingers. ‘Cause I was like, ‘this is gonna work.’ Seeing that ending affect people was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever experienced in my life, especially in a movie theater. Of all the films I’ve been involved in. Watching the ending of Saw with an audience was the craziest thing ever. I could get goosebumps now just thinking about it.”
Whannell left the series as a creative force after Saw III, only retaining an executive producer credit on the subsequent sequels. He reflected on the franchise that Saw has become, saying, “For me, I am not such a fan of the latest Saw movies. It’s not that I think they’re bad movies, it’s just that I’ve separated myself from that. Like, I feel like they should have ended it with the third movie, you know? But having said that, it’s one of those things. A reality of Hollywood is that when someone owns that IP, they can keep doing it. They do it. It’s not really up to you anymore. Also, I meet these Saw fans, and they love Saw V or VI or VII. You know, so I don’t wanna take anything away from them. So I’m happy that it continues over there. And then I’ve got this other life over here, where I’m making my own movies. And what’s great now is people will come up to me and talk about movies I’ve directed. They’ll say like, I love Upgrade, or I love Invisible Man. And I’m like, ‘Oh, wow. I’m experiencing this second life as a director.’ So I’m just really happy about that. You know, it means I’m more comfortable to let Saw be a thing over there now that I’ve got my own thing going.”
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