{"id":832875,"date":"2026-05-30T18:18:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T18:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/832875\/"},"modified":"2026-05-30T18:18:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T18:18:17","slug":"jason-blum-james-wan-on-youtube-filmmakers-building-disney-of-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/832875\/","title":{"rendered":"Jason Blum & James Wan On YouTube Filmmakers, Building “Disney Of Horror”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEven as many are in a doom-and-gloom state of mind about entertainment, producers Jason Blum<\/a> and James Wan<\/a> have nothing but good things to say, with their horror films\u00a0Obsession<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Backrooms<\/a>\u00a0dominating the box office this month.<\/p>\n

\n\tJoining outgoing PGA President Stephanie Allain<\/a> for a fireside chat at Produced by Conference<\/a> today on the Universal Studios lot, Blum expressed the belief that we\u2019re in a \u201creally f*cking exciting\u201d moment for movies.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSince Covid, there\u2019s been this lethargic feeling around theatrical, and is it relevant anymore, and is it going to survive?\u201d the Blumhouse chief said. \u201cAnd what I think is so incredible about\u00a0Obsession\u00a0and\u00a0Backrooms\u00a0is that they\u2019re a new kind of movie. They\u2019re made by non-traditional directors, directors who really honed their skills as creators online.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBackrooms\u00a0and\u00a0Obsession, Blum said, \u201care edgy and weird and f*cking nuts, and to me, there\u2019s almost this feeling of the \u201970s, of this new generation of young people who are making edgy movies that are connecting in theaters in a crazy way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom his perspective, the fact that \u201cthe stars of the internet want to make movies\u201d \u2014 and for the big screen in particular, despite their point of creative origin \u2014 means \u201cthere\u2019s f*cking hope in the movie business, and it\u2019s exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring the panel, Blum shared that\u00a0Obsession\u00a0crossed $100M last night and has now done something no film has since\u00a0E.T., with its box office trending upward two weekends in a row after opening.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe reason that titles like Curry Barker<\/a>\u2018s are resonating so powerfully, he believes, is that \u201cYouTube creators are so obsessed and so connected to their audience\u201d \u2014 something their attitude toward test screenings embodies.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhereas for a traditional director coming out of NYU, test screenings have often been a \u201cpainful\u201d exercise, akin to \u201cswallowing glass,\u201d YouTube creators are embracing the process.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThey\u2019re sitting at the front row, recording the audience with the camera. They\u2019re just obsessed about how the audience is reacting to their movies, and I think that\u2019s one of the reasons that these movies are connecting with younger people in the way that they are,\u201d Blum mused. \u201cBecause they\u2019re created by a group of people who are thinking about directing in a very different way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tElsewhere in the panel, Blum and Wan reflected on the merger of their leading horror companies, Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, which closed over two years ago.<\/p>\n

\n\tBlum said that despite the fact that the move was \u201cextremely unusual\u201d and \u201ctook a very long time to do,\u201d it\u2019s worked because he and Wan complement one another\u2019s skill sets \u2014 with Wan as more of the creative, and Blum as the business mind, first and foremost.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe idea is that \u201cit\u2019s two labels and one company,\u201d he explained. \u201cSo James has his creative group, Blumhouse has our creative group, but we share everything else\u2026 In the beginning, it was a very conscious effort to keep two cultures with one P&L, and I think we\u2019ve done a pretty good job.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe strength of the combined companies, Blum said, is their ability to take their \u201cunderstanding of how to harness the talent of these new generation of creators and turn it into theatrical movies, which is complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking to\u00a0Obsession\u00a0in particular, Blum noted that he got involved via producers Adam Hendricks & Greg Gilreath of Divide\/Conquer. He admitted that he initially \u201cdid not understand\u201d the project the way that duo did but committed to it because he believed in their vision, not to mention Barker\u2019s command in talking about his work. Subsequently, he committed to backing Barker\u2019s follow-up feature\u00a0Anything but Ghosts, which he said Focus will release sometime next year.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Blum,\u00a0Obsession\u2018s success is a reflection of a course correction at Blumhouse that took place around a year ago.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe had a string of movies that didn\u2019t perform as well as I wanted them to, and we made a bunch of internal changes in the company,\u201d he said. \u201cWe hired Sam Zimmerman to really go back to our roots, to start looking at low-budget movies again through a different lens. Our older low-budget movies were almost never directed by a first-time director, so we were looking at low-budget movies by a younger generation of filmmakers\u2026It was a very calculated thing that we did, so it\u2019s very satisfying to see it pay off like it\u2019s paying off with\u00a0Obsession.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking to the long-term vision at Blumhouse-Atomic Monster<\/a>, Blum said that success will continue to be found in the refusal to \u201cget comfortable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat\u2019s the aspiration?\u201d he said. \u201c\u2018The Disney of horror\u2019 is the aspiration in five years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMarking the feature directorial debut of Kane Parsons<\/a>, who was 16 when first approached by Wan, the creepypasta-inspired Backrooms opened Friday and is expected to make as much as $90M in its opening weekend, which would be a record achievement for an A24 film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even as many are in a doom-and-gloom state of mind about entertainment, producers Jason Blum and James Wan…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":832876,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[310044,341571,109689,171,58204,109690,310045,53,107048,341572,341573,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-832875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-backrooms","tag-blumhouse-atomic-monster","tag-curry-barker","tag-entertainment","tag-james-wan","tag-jason-blum","tag-kane-parsons","tag-movies","tag-obsession","tag-produced-by-conference","tag-stephanie-allain","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116664906983357924","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=832875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/832876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=832875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=832875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=832875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}