“It’s been a great year for us,” says Jason Blum, humbly offering up an early contender for biggest understatement of 2017.
The uber-producer is no stranger to success. His company Blumhouse has nurtured horror franchises, such as Paranormal Activity, Insidious, Ouija and The Purge, to box-office glory and even seen Academy recognition for Damien Chazelle’s debut drumming drama Whiplash, but the past few months have seen him score his two biggest hits to date. He continued the rehabilitation of M Night Shyamalan with Hitchockian psycho-thriller Split and broke new ground with Jordan Peele’s transcendent Get Out, a crowd-pleasing horror film, as well as an acclaimed commentary on the myth of a post-racial America.
But what makes his successes even more notable is the jaw-dropping difference in budget and box office. As a rule, he tends not to green-light a film that will cost over $5m (with rare exceptions) – small change in Hollywood terms, which keeps his profit margin the envy of the industry. For example, the production cost of the entire Paranormal Activity franchise was $28m, and the films made $890m globally; while Get Out has made $251m worldwide from just $4.5m. It’s a machine that continues to impress, and he recently expanded his empire to the world of print with Blumhouse Books.
The company’s third release, Feral, co-written by The Purge creator/director James DeMonaco, is a dystopian thriller set in a world where men become infected with a virus that turns them aggressive, leaving women to fend for themselves. It’s a cinematic story and, given Blum’s pedigree, one would assume that a movie would naturally be on the way, but DeMonaco denies that this is the main objective.
“I hope to make this movie, but that was never the goal,” he tells me. “I’ve always wanted to write novels, ever since I was little. This is a whole different muscle for me to flex.”
Given the challenging budgets of Blum’s pictures, the novel also gave DeMonaco the opportunity to think big. “My screenplays were becoming tighter, becoming these very economical things, especially as I was working within the parameters of a budget, which I think is good sometimes because they force you to be creative,” he says. “But then I was allowed with Feral to open up and explore. So now when I came back to the screenwriting world, I almost had to undo that because I wanted to return to the kind of economy that does service a screenplay.”
Blum sees it as another way for the writers and directors he works with to tell a story. “We’re trying to be a home for our artists, and be an outlet for them no matter what they want to do: write a book, do a live event, do a television series, make a movie,” he tells me. “Having a book division helps me keep books front of mind when we’re talking to people about how to get their stories out into the world.”
It’s an extension of an empire that recently branched out to the small screen with, you guessed it, Blumhouse Television, set to launch with a series about disgraced Fox News head Roger Ailes and a show based on hit franchise The Purge.
DeMonaco’s nifty pitch for a world where, for one day, all crime is made legal, has led to one of the company’s biggest successes and with each film, box office has increased. “I think we stepped into something with the third film that was very topical and I didn’t know that as I was going in,” DeMonaco says of last year’s expertly timed The Purge: Election Year. “I wasn’t foreseeing the Trump/Hillary battle that was coming on the horizon, but we fell into that nicely. It was very serendipitous for the film.”
He recently finished the script for the fourth film, scheduled for a 2018 release, and has felt an undeniable influence from the alarming state of US politics around him. “Because of the shit-show that’s happening around us, I couldn’t ignore it,” he says. “In this one, it’s more blatant than the previous three. I’m openly just watching the news, sifting through it and seeing what could fit into the storyline and there’s a lot sadly. There’s a lot of stuff from the headlines that can metaphorically fit into The Purge and what’s what people like about it, I think.”
It’s this same topicality that has also fed into his novel, even though it might not always be a conscious process. “I’m never purposefully trying to be topical, but when people have read Feral, they’ve told me it’s relevant because of the women’s movement and violence against women,” he says. “I don’t set out for that but maybe Feral acts as topical mirror like The Purge.”
It also helped Get Out resonate with audiences and critics earlier this year. The incisive film’s huge success, accompanied by Oscar buzz, has led to whispers of a sequel, motivated mainly by a look back at Blum’s history of franchising genre hits (a follow-up to his other hit of the year, Split, is already under way).
“It’s a total Jordan question,” Blum says, brushing it off. “In almost every one of our other franchises, it’s never my preference to have someone else come into them, but it’s possible. I can imagine with Insidious or Purge or Paranormal Activity – especially Paranormal Activity, if we ever rebooted that – I could imagine someone else coming in and taking it in a different direction. With Get Out, that would be impossible. So the only way there could ever be a continuation of Get Out is if Jordan thought of something, and I would never ever pressure him one way or the other. If I say to you there’ll never be a sequel, in three years watch him come to me with a sequel idea and I’ll be wrong. If Jordan’s moved and has an idea that he thinks could top the first movie, I’m sure I’ll hear about it and if he doesn’t, there will never be a sequel.”
- Feral is out now
