Jason Blum & How ‘Grease’, ‘Saturday Night Fever’ & ‘Wizard Of Oz’ Sparked His Blumhouse Fright Factory – Miramax Presents The Film That Lit My Fuse, Halloween Edition

Fuse always fetes the Halloween holiday with great makers of genre fare, and we’ve had the likes of John Carpenter, Stephen King, James Wan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Mike Flanagan, Darren Lynn Bousman and Eli Roth grace us in the past. Today, we look at a producer and studio chief who has influenced the genre game as much as anyone in recent years.

As an exec at the old Miramax Films, Jason Blum hatched films like The Others, and when he became a producer, he made prestige films like The Reader and Hysterical Blindness. But he is best known for creating Blumhouse, the Universal-based genre factory that launched with big creative swings on micro-budgets that led to The Purge, Insidious, Sinister and M3GAN franchises and the Oscar-nominated Jordan Peele-directed Get Out. Discounted as a comedy guy, Peele was widely turned down before Blum saw the potential and stepped up with the green light that launched Peele into the stratosphere.

Blum learned the power of the genre formula early when he produced Paranormal Activity, and watched the $15,000-budget film gross nearly $200 million worldwide, to become arguably the most profitable film in movie history. He has replicated those outsized multiples a scary number of times.

Blumhouse just released Five Nights at Freddy’s, about a man trying to survive the murderous impulses of costumed creatures in a Chucky Cheese-like venue. The company is coming off The Exorcist: Believer, which cost more than the typical Blumhouse picture, after Universal paid a fortune for franchise rights that came from the William Peter Blatty novel that was turned into the William Friedkin-directed classic. While that movie wasn’t a big hit, Blumhouse and Universal haven’t exorcised the potential of that franchise, and they’ll for sure be back for more.

Find out how the hitmaking producer/studio chief found his creative mojo.