Jason Blum is producing a new Blair Witch movie, a collaboration between the producers own Blumhouse and Lionsgate.
The project was announced at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, according to articles from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. As of yet, no plot details have yet emerged or been announced. This is the first in a multi-film deal with Lionsgate, where Blumhouse will get to take a crack at horror classics. More news about those collaborations is pending.
Blumhouse itself is best known for turning big profits on cheap horror movies like Paranormal Activity, The Purge, and Get Out. Lionsgate and Blumhouse also jointly produced the horror flick Imaginary, which released this year.
Blum will produce the movie with Roy Lee, who also produced the 2016 sequel/reboot titled simply Blair Witch. Blum said, “I’m very grateful to Adam [Fogelson] and the team at Lionsgate for letting us play in their sandbox. I’m a huge admirer of The Blair Witch Project, which brought the idea of found footage horror to mainstream audiences and became a true cultural phenomenon. I don’t think there would have been a Paranormal Activity had there not first been a Blair Witch, so this feels like a truly special opportunity and I’m excited to see where it leads.”
The Blair Witch Project followed three amateur filmmakers who enter the Black Hill forests in Maryland to film a documentary about the titular witch. The original film grossed $248 million on a production budget of $35,000 and broke open the floodgates for found footage horror. Both the original sequel Book of Shadows and the 2016 reboot concern larger groups of people who also attempt to brave the Blair Witch’s wooded territory. There was also a Blair Witch video game from Bloober Team in 2019.
