Jason Blum
Jason Blum
Jason Ferus Blum is an American film producer. Blum is the founder and CEO of Blumhouse Productions. He won the 2014 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie for producing The Normal Heart, and was nominated for the 2014 Academy Award for Best Picture for producing Whiplash...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionProducer
CountryUnited States of America
trying passionate stuff
I really am passionate about making low-budget movies. You can try new stuff and unusual stuff, and you can break the rules.
thinking trying quality
But one of the rules I don't like to break is we still do - 95% of our movies are low budget. We're offered bigger, larger budget movies to produce a lot, and we don't do them. That's not to say there aren't exceptions, there are a few exceptions, but I try and stick by the rules that produce what I think is the highest quality, most innovative work and try and let the rules go that make us feel like we're retreading.
mistake successful thinking
I think the mistake people make with horror movies and what makes them successful is a lot of horror movies get made by people who don't really like them, so they don't respect them. And when you like horror and have admiration for it, that community knows that what's important for a horror movie is important for every other kind of movie.
mind months window
There's S-VOD, which is 3 1/2 months after the theatrical release. The windows are going to get closer and closer, and the sooner they collapse in my mind the better it'll be for everybody. It's coming, but change is hard. It will be more profitable for everybody, including exhibitors.
ideas underdog almost-done
But, it's much easier to do that than produce the movies from scratch. It excites the same thing in me, whether we build it from the ground up, or whether we come on when the movie is done or almost done. The idea of supporting the underdog and getting a smaller movie out there in a big way is equally exciting.
scary scare elements
Horror is great storytelling with scary elements on top of it, but if you don't have great storytelling, you can have all the scares in the world, but the movie won't work.
creative lows budgets
We have creative freedom because of budgets. Ever since I have been doing low budget movies, we've really had creative freedom.
helping like-you feels
I'm a believer in screening movies early, and using the movie itself to help sell the movie. If you can't do that, I feel like you shouldn't be releasing the movie.
giving people creative
The model we established was to give creative people complete creative freedom in exchange for betting on themselves, so they work for the minimums you're allowed to work for, and if the movies work in a big way, everyone does very well. If the movies don't, nobody loses too much money. The benefit to doing all the movies low budget is we can tell different types of stories and take creative risks. The Purge would have been irresponsible to do for $20M, but to do it for $3M makes sense.
giving creative anything-goes
There are a lot of parallels between doing a sequel and doing low budget movies, which is they give creative parameters. As a creative person myself, I work better with parameters as opposed to anything goes.
reading scripts want
My easiest judgment for a script is 'do I want to keep reading it?'
laughing people scared
For some reason, people value being scared less than they value laughing.
love-is long people
People love being scared, even for long periods of time.
art people found
I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand.