ComingSoon’s Jonathan Sim recently spoke with Jason Blum, the founder and CEO of Blumhouse Productions, the studio behind iconic films such as Get Out, Paranormal Activity, and, most recently, Five Nights at Freddy’s. At New York Comic Con 2023, Blum spoke about the history of the company and what we can expect to see next.
Jonathan Sim: I’m a huge fan of what Blumhouse has been doing for the past few years, and you guys have made some of my favorite movies of all time. From your perspective, are there any particular projects that you’ve worked on before where you can say in particular, I’m proud to have made that movie happen?
Jason Blum: Many of our movies. I’m proud Get Out happened. I’m proud [of] Whiplash. I’m proud The Purge happened. I’m proud the first Halloween movie happened. I’m proud Invisible Man happened. I’m proud Happy Death Day happened. I’m proud Five Nights at Freddy’s happened. There are lots of them.
Can you tell me a little bit about what your approach is when first developing a Blumhouse project? How do you decide this is a good fit for Blumhouse, and how do you decide that it matches what you’re going for?
First, we want to make sure that, first and foremost, it can be made inexpensively ’cause we make movies for a low budget. Then we want to make sure that it’s scary. Gotta be really scary. Absolutely. And then we try and make sure that it feels new or different in some way that doesn’t feel like we’re ripping off either our old movies or other people’s old movies.
Blumhouse has a bunch of upcoming movies coming out that I’m really excited for. Is there anything that you can say about your upcoming slate that can then get audiences really excited for if you’re excited about it?
Yeah, I’m really excited about Five Nights at Freddy’s. I’m really excited about Night Swim. We have a couple more coming next year, which hopefully we’ll get to finish because of the strike. But I’m focused on Five Nights at Freddy’s and Night Swim and very excited about those two movies.
