Even as many are in a doom-and-gloom state of mind about entertainment, with their films Obsession and Backrooms dominating the box office this month, producers Jason Blum and James Wan have nothing but good things to say not only about the state of horror, but about where the industry as a whole is headed.
Joining outgoing PGA President Stephanie Allain at Produced by Conference today on the Universal Studios lot, Blum expressed the belief that we’re in a “really f*cking exciting” moment for movies.
“Since Covid, there’s been this lethargic feeling around theatrical, and is it relevant anymore, and is it going to survive?” the Blumhouse chief said. “And what I think is so incredible about Obsession and Backrooms is that they’re a new kind of movie. They’re made by non-traditional directors, directors who really honed their skills as creators online. We’ve been sourcing…directors from this new place, and what’s so fascinating about these young people, these artists coming from online creation, is that their hope and desire and dream…is to make cool movies.”
Backrooms and Obsession, Blum said, “are edgy and weird and f*cking nuts, and to me, there’s almost this feeling of the ’70s, of this new generation of young people who are making edgy movies that are connecting in theaters in a crazy way.”
From his perspective, the fact that “the stars of the internet want to make movies” — and for the big screen in particular, despite their point of creative origin — means “there’s f*cking hope in the movie business, and it’s exciting and great.”
During the panel, Blum shared that Obsession crossed $100M last night and has now done something no film has since E.T., with its box office trending upward two weekends in a row after opening.
The reason that titles like Curry Barker‘s are resonating so powerfully, he believes is that “YouTube creators are so obsessed and so connected to their audience” — something their attitude toward test screenings embodies.
Whereas for a traditional director coming out of NYU, test screenings have often been a “painful” exercise, akin to “swallowing glass,” YouTube creators are embracing the process.
“They’re sitting at the front row, recording the audience with the camera. They’re just obsessed about how the audience is reacting to their movies, and I think that’s one of the reasons that these movies are connecting with younger people in the way that they are,” Blum mused. “Because they’re created by a group of people who are thinking about directing in a very different way.”
Elsewhere in the panel, Blum and Wan reflected on the merger of their companies, Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, which closed over two years ago.
Blum said that despite the fact that the move was “extremely unusual” and “took a very long time to do,” it’s worked because he and Wan complement one another’s skill sets — with Wan as more of the creative, and Blum as the business mind, first and foremost.
The idea is that “it’s two labels and one company,” he explained. “So James has his creative group, Blumhouse has our creative group, but we share everything else… In the beginning, it was a very conscious effort to keep two cultures with one P&L, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job.”
The strength of the combined companies, Blum said, is their ability to take their “understanding of how to harness the talent of these new generation of creators and turn it into theatrical movies, which is complicated.”
Speaking to Obsession in particular, Blum noted that he got involved via producers Adam Hendricks & Greg Gilreath of Divide/Conquer. He admitted that he initially “did not understand” the project the way that duo did but committed to it both because he “believed” in their vision, not to mention Barker’s command in talking about his work. Subsequently, he committed to backing Barker’s follow-up feature Anything but Ghosts, which he said Focus will release sometime next year.
For Blum, Obsession‘s success is a reflection of a course correction at Blumhouse that took place around a year ago.
“We had a string of movies that didn’t perform as well as I wanted them to, and we made a bunch of internal changes in the company,” he said. “We hired Sam Zimmerman to really go back to our roots, to start looking at low-budget movies again through a different lens. Our older low-budget movies were almost never directed by a first-time director, so we were looking at low-budget movies by a younger generation of filmmakers. We made a big commitment to a company called Divide/Conquer…It was a very calculated thing that we did, so it’s very satisfying to see it pay off like it’s paying off with Obsession.”
Speaking to the long-term vision at Blumhouse-Atomic Monster, Blum said that success will continue to be found in the refusal to “get comfortable.”
“What’s the aspiration?” he said. “‘The Disney of horror’ is the aspiration in five years.”
