Lionsgate announced last week that in partnership with Jason Blum, the guy who brought us pretty much every horror film of the past fifteen years, is setting the Blair Witch Project up for a reboot! Since Blum kickstarted his career with the Paranormal Activity franchise, he admittedly has a lot of thanks for the original “found footage” horror film that went on to be billed as one of the most successful independent films of all time (reportedly produced for under $40,000 it went on to gross over $240 million).
While there have been a few attempts to reawaken the Blair Witch, through the 2001 sequel and 2016 sequel (which kind of ignored the 2001 sequel), nothing has really stuck just yet. The 2001 sequel was a flop ($15M budget grossing domestically only $26M) while Blair Witch 2016 had a mildly better showing ($5M budget grossing domestically about $20M), the spark and flame generated by the original has often been replicated but never fully realized for myriad reasons but hopefully with the chops of Jason Blum and his team, we’ll see a reboot worthy of the fans that bring back some of that creepy magic we first saw in 1999.
But wait, there’s more.
Meanwhile, on Instagram, Josh Leonard, one of the original stars, has come out against this reboot. If you saw the original press release, Leonard’s face is front and center in the release photograph. And while the reboot isn’t necessarily what triggered his frustration it was more the fact that his face was used without any forewarning. This seems to have opened a can of worms that you can read in his Instagram post below:
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With “25 years of disrespect” this all seems pretty justified. What do you think? Are you looking forward to a remake? Is Leonard right to be frustrated with Lionsgate? Let us know in the comments!
