“There’s a spotlight on it,” he says during lunch, “because it’s the reverse type of deal than Blumhouse has ever done.” The ‘Blumhouse system’ It’s Blum’s biggest gamble yet-financially and reputationally-and he knows it. Which brings us to The Exorcist: Believer, a new chapter of the 1973 horror classic, from the filmmaking team behind Blumhouse’s wildly successful reboot of the Halloween franchise. Of course, this is exactly the moment in the movie when the main character’s demons drive him to a fateful decision that puts it all at risk. Blumhouse will be the Disney of horror, only with better profit margins. It won Peele an Oscar for his screenplay.Īt the moment, Blumhouse is in the final stages of a merger with Atomic Monster, the horror production house formed by Insidious director James Wan, and once the deal is complete, the combined company will have a stranglehold on the genre. Get Out, a darkly comic allegory about the Black experience of racism in America, cost just $4.5 million to make and earned $255 million worldwide. In 2017, Blum gambled on a low-budget horror film by the sketch comedian and first-time director Jordan Peele, and it turned out to be one of the most socially important films of the decade. He mixes it up with tense thrillers ( BlacKKKlansman, Whiplash) that collect Oscar nominations without even trying. It’s a modern-style Tetris of open sunny squares, filled with hard-right angles for ax murderers to hide behind.īlum founded Blumhouse Productions in 2000, and after a humbling decade before his first breakthrough success, he spent the next decade making global box office hits ( The Purge, Insidious, The Invisible Man, M3GAN) for little more than the catering costs on a Marvel movie. Jason Blum’s country retreat in the low mountains of central Connecticut is the kind of house where, in a Blumhouse movie, something terrible happens. And I’m sure the only reason I hung on to Paranormal as long as I did is because somewhere in my head, I was thinking about that soup-can story.” Building the Disney of horror “ Paranormal Activity was my soup-can moment,” Blum says now. In Latin it means “wild” or “savage.” Suffice it to say he’s thought about this a lot. Jason Blum knows every detail of this story, every fateful twist and turn in the tale. They’re up there on the walls at MoMA right now, all 32. In 1996 he sold them into the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, at a steep and generous discount, for $15 million. Irving Blum turned out to be the only private owner of Warhol’s now-iconic series. Then once he’d reunited them, he bought all 32 soup cans from Warhol for $1,000, which he paid in $100 increments over 10 months. Warhol agreed, so Blum set about buying back the canvases. But before the canvases shipped out, Blum decided he couldn’t bear the thought of the soup cans being split up. art scene, and he sold five of the paintings, for $200 each. The Warhol show at Blum’s Ferus Gallery was a big happening in the protean L.A. On the spot, Blum offered Warhol his first solo show in Los Angeles, but just for the soup cans. No one in the New York art scene liked Andy Warhol. art dealer named Irving Blum, and it opens with the day he visited the small Upper East Side Manhattan apartment of a kooky weirdo who was painting a ludicrously extensive series of Campbell’s soup cans. It’s a story about Jason’s father, an ascendant young L.A. But there’s another version of Jason Blum’s origin story-more of a prequel, really-and it takes place in 1962, seven years before he was born.
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