On first glance, 2009’s “Paranormal Activity” doesn’t seem like an endlessly repeatable franchise. A found-footage movie made entirely in the director’s own home with unknown actors largely improvising seems like the kind of thing that only works as well as it did one time, never mind the fact that the movie’s closest comparison point — 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project” — infamously spawned only one sequel (at the time, anyway) which went in an entirely different direction so as to avoid such seemingly obvious pitfalls.
As Blum recalled to IGN recently, some naysayers believed the first “Paranormal Activity” would be the only Blumhouse movie ever made:
“After we had done Paranormal Activity, everyone said, ‘Well, it’s The Blair Witch Project, it’s a magic trick. There’ll never be any more Paranormal Activities and there’ll never be any more Blumhouse movies and this guy, Jason Blum, got lucky.’ And, you know, ‘he’ll never be able to do this again.’ And the second movie we set out to do was Insidious.”
Not only did Blum prove himself in several ways, going on to produce numerous box office hits and turning Blumhouse into a label to be reckoned with, but he specifically turned both “Paranormal Activity” and “Insidious” into long-running franchises (their latest installments premiering in 2021 and this very year, respectively).
Source From: www.slashfilm.com
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