← Channels with Peter Kafka
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A
Hey, I'm Matt Buchel, comedian, writer and floating head you may or may not have seen on your fyp, and I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, Don't Swipe Away. It's called that Sounds Like a Lot. You know that feeling when you check your phone, read a few headlines and think, that sounds like a lot. I can't do this. Well, I can and I'm going to get into it every Friday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world and then I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or honestly, anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to feel a little better about it. That sounds like a lot. Coming May 1st part of the Vox Media Podcast Network
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B
More and more Americans are finding themselves taking care of their kids and their parents at the same time.
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Well, you know, I joke that there's a dark game which I was playing. Which family member will I disappoint today?
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B
How to care for others without burning out in the process. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Find new episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Foreign hi, I'm Sally Helm. Inflammation. It is something I've been seeing a lot of people talk about, especially on TikTok and according to them, inflammation is basically the whole problem with our health. It causes heart problems, anxiety, acne.
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C
It is maybe even the root of all diseases.
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B
So how accurate is that? That's this week on Unexplainable.
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D
From the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also chief correspondent at Business Insider. Today we are talking about movies and how to make them in a world where it's hard to get people to watch movies. That is the challenge facing producer Jason Blum, who has a very good track record when it comes to getting people into theaters. He is best known for low budget horror movies like Paranormal Activities, Insidious, the Purge. Even if you never see horror movies, you definitely saw get out from 2017. That was his breakthrough Once in a Lifetime crossover hit. I've talked to Blum a few times over the years, starting about a decade ago when he had a really good formula for keeping costs low and returns at least on a mega super smash. Super high. But over that time it has gotten harder and harder to get people off the couch and into theaters and I wanted to ask him how he's adapting or not to the new realities. As you'll hear, Blum is an optimist. You cannot really make movies unless you are an optimist.
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But he's also pretty clear eyed about
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D
what's really changing and what isn't in this industry. We recorded this one live in San Francisco as part of Business Insider's Long Play event in April. Pretty sure we will have more of these to come, perhaps in a city near you. In the meantime, here's me talking to Blumhouse Productions.
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E
Jason Blum, we did one of these 10 years ago, right? You were crushing it. You were doing so well. You became a Harvard Business Review case study.
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B
Yes, Anita, for those of you for
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E
those of you who let your Harvard Business Review subscription lapse, please sum up very briefly what your amazing formula was. The formula you had for making ultra successful movies for very little money.
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B
So different than the case it was. That's slightly different than what the case study was. The formula was I saw an under exploited part of the movie business. I did Paranormal Activity. That was like the first big hit I had. And I was in my mid-30s, so I was old enough to not when you're younger or in your 20s, you have directors who will make a movie and it'll be a big hit and the movie will be a romantic comedy. And then they want to make like a action movie, which is a big mistake because what Hollywood wants is more of the same from what you've done successfully. So after and making hits is one of the hardest things in the world to do. So after Paranormal Activity, I did only low budget horror. I did a movie called the Insidious, which is a franchise, and the Purge and Sinister. Those were the four movies that I did. And my formula was making independent films that were released by studios. So we made these movies, they cost a million dollars. We didn't pay ourselves. So it was easy to negotiate with the directors and the actors who also didn't get paid or got paid scale or as little as you're allowed to pay them. We shared a much bigger part of the profits of the movies with the people that then the studios shared typically. So in the early years, we made a handful of people an enormous amount of money very quickly and it took off from there.
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E
If you got movies and you didn't even put movies, you didn't put every one of your movies into the theaters. You had this sort of rigorous testing because not every movie was good enough to be in a theater.
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B
Well, that was also very different and new. It's not new now, but the notion that a studio. This is not independent movies. These are studios. They were Universal, Sony, Paramount, was Paranormal Activity. A studio before we started would never start production on a movie and not have a date for when the movie was going to come out. And I insisted on my contract with Universal. It's still with Universal, but we work everywhere, but primarily with Universal, that when we. And it's no longer like this, by the way, but that when we would make the movie, they would not date the film. And it was a great. It was a great winning strategy because when we made bad movies, which it's impossible not to make lots of movies, and some of them be bad, and about half of them. Bad is a harsh word, but half of them weren't terribly commercial or weren't as commercial as we hoped and anticipated they would be. But instead of losing money, we would just put them on tv and so they kind of disappeared. We would make our money back and we would keep taking little bets. And it was almost. It was. We. It was compared in the early days to the pharmaceutical business where you take many, many, many, many little bets. And then the ones that would pay off, you would lean into. So when you got a purge or you got an insidious, you'd have a franchise, you'd spend more money on the sequels and you'd lean into the IP that worked and the IP that didn't work. You didn't get hurt. You got your money back. And I focused in the early days a lot on making sure that the movies that weren't. That didn't get big releases got the money back. And that's how we got the volume. Because as long as we never lost money on a movie, Universal said, make as many movies as you want. We would make eight, 10 movies a year, have four released and four go to TV.
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E
So you have this winning strategy, but that doesn't happen.
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B
And now. Sorry to interrupt, but now everybody does that. Amazon makes a movie, they watch it and they decide if it's gonna be theatrical or like Hail Mary or if it's gonna go straight to streaming. And now that's kind of a norm in this is where I was going.
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E
You're doing a lot of stuff that was unique other. And now it's not. Lots of folks do. Horror at the time was an unexplored niche. And the idea of theaters itself. Right. Is a question mark. Right. Dar Movie going moviegoing shrinks every year. And there's always a debate about why is this happening? Is it going to come Back, but it's shrinking. Every year people go to fewer movies than they did in the past.
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B
This year it's up. Yeah, this year it's up 20%. A 10 year is probably up 10% because, because it's, it's a cheat because when they say the box office is up 20% they raise ticket prices and attendance goes down. But attendance is up a little bit this year. But since to your point, since the pandemic theater going attendance has not recovered and even pre pandemic attendance was on a general decline, but they were raising ticket prices. So box office was going up, attendance was going.
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E
Moviegoing has been no longer true in decline since 2002. You say it's back this year. We'll see at the end of the year.
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B
It's not back to what it was. It's just a little better than last year.
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E
What I want to get to is how have you adapted your model to comport with the world? Right. People are, it's harder to get people into theaters. Horror is not a unique thing anymore. Lots of people are doing it. How have you adapted your model to that?
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B
Yeah, we've changed our, our business. So, so the movies that we made in the, in the old days were, were really, they were programmers, which means when you there was, there was a lot of walk up business to movie theaters. So kids would go to the movies, they would not know what movie they were going to see. They would get to the thing, they would look at the choices like I'm go see this horror movie. Those were usually movies that we made. Those movies don't exist anymore. There really aren't programmers anymore. Almost everyone going to the movie is going to, it's too expensive I think in my mind. And so it's like it's taken that part of the business out. And I think as an entrepreneur, I think the hardest thing to do is when you first start a business and, or if I didn't go to business school. But what they teach in business school, as all of you guys know, and what they, what they first tell you is you got to focus, focus, focus. And that's what we did. We had Paranormal Activity was a low budget horror movie. Everyone said you should make World War Z. You know, now you had a hit movie in Hollywood, you should. And, and the general religion of Hollywood is if you make a movie for $5 million and it's a big hit, you should make a $50 million movie. And if you make a $50 million, it's a big hit, you should make a $200 million movie. And I threw that out and I just said, I'm just going to make low budget horror movies. So I did. Focus, focus, focus, repeat, repeat, repeat. Stay in horror, stay in horror, stay in horror. But then to just finish my point, I think you also as an entrepreneur have to like, be aware of what's happening in the world around you and be able to pivot. And I think it's very tricky to know how much to focus and how much to pivot. And so the way we had to pivot, because post pandemic programming movies have disappeared and horror has become much more event driven. Movies are bigger and they have to feel. You have to give people a reason to want to go see a horror movie two weeks in advance of it coming out. So we pivoted in in two ways. The movies, we don't. We make movies that are relatively inexpensive, but nowhere near as inexpensive as they used to be. So we're spending more money on the movies. And we had our number. The number two competitor to Blumhouse was a company called Atomic Monster. Atomic Monster is most famous for all the conjuring movies and the nun and all the spin offs of the conjuring movies. And so three years ago we merged with them and that was a way to increase our output without decreasing the quality of what we do. And so far it's been, it's been very successful.
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E
So I'm glad that we did. You've got a new movie coming out
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B
Friday coming out called the Mummy, which is a Warner Brothers movie, which opens Friday, which is an Atomic monster movie, actually.
- [10:57]
E
So how is that different than a movie you would have made 10 years?
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B
So the mummy, mummy cost 22 million and not 4 million again by studio standards. Still inexpensive, but not as inexpensive. The other big component to our model, and I took advantage of the fact that if you're an executive at a studio and you're hiring a director, it's. You're very incentivized to hire a director whose last movie was a hit. Because if you make a movie as an executive and the movie doesn't work and your boss says, what the hell were you doing? You could point to the director and say, well, look, the last movie they made was a hit, so I assume this one would be too. So the result of that is that directors who made a hit one movie ago, but their most recent movie is not a hit almost never get. Almost never would almost never get hired. And certainly in the movies they would go to TV or whatever. They were really prejudiced against. So we would go to those people and it was like an arbitrage opportunity. We'd go to them and say, I'm not gonna pay you, but. But I'll give you a final cut, so I'll let you do what you want to do. And they always had something to prove. And we would say, and if the movie works, I'll share a big piece of it with you and you could make more money than you've ever made if the movie works. And that was very successful. That worked for that kind of programmer type of movie. But now to make event horror, you need. It's harder to bet on that person.
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E
You can't take a flyer.
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B
You can't really take a flyer. So Lee Cronin directed it. He's never missed. And so his name is in the title. It's his name, yeah. So in that way, it's not quite as fun as it used to be because you can't really take flyers. Like, like you could. So we're working with more in demand people we used to work with, with people who were less in demand in fact. Amazing story. James Wan, who is my partner who runs Atomic Monster, who's the company that we merge with. I met James because he famously wrote and directed and conceived of Saw, which is one of the biggest horror franchises ever. As, as, as, as everyone here knows, we actually just acquired it for him to kind of. He did one movie for Saw and then they made it eight without him. And we're gonna, he's gonna kind of reboot it. But regardless, that's not the story. The story is he did Saw and then he did two movies for Universal that didn't work at all. And he came to my office in 2008 or something when the company started and he said, I have an idea for a horror movie. I can make it for $900,000. He said, I'm known for making Saw and it's like this R rated movie and I just want to make a PG13 horror movie. It's called Insidious and it's 900 grand and Insidious, now that we're on our seventh one, it comes out in August. It's an $800 million franchise. And that was the greatest example of the guy could not get arrested. We gave him 900 grand and it turned into $800 million.
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E
You've talked about in this era the importance of IP, that people need to know what the thing is generally, and that's usually what works. People have to know what the brand
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B
is that's part of the. No walk up that they want something, something familiar.
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E
It's the mummy. Is it the Lee Cronin? Are they responding to that? What are people.
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B
No, they're responding to the Mummy. They're responding to the. I mean, the hope is they're responding to the Mummy. We'll see if they respond. But the idea is we did the Invisible man, which as a horror movie, it's literally.
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E
I've heard of this character. I'm vaguely familiar with what it is.
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B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or we do. Or we'll do. We're doing the Dead by Daylight video game as a movie so that there's something out there and that's a different. That's different. You know, it didn't used to be like that.
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E
That.
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D
We'll be right back with Jason Blum. But first award from a sponsor.
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F
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C
I'm Mitch, first two time Indigo Brass Cell Champion, championship MVP and forward for the US Women's National Team. Before I went pro, I graduated from Harvard with a degree in psychology, which comes in handy more than you think. Any athlete pursuing greatness knows there's a certain mentality you have to have. What people don't know is what that costs. In my podcast, Confessions of an Elite Athlete, I sit down with the best athletes in the world and explore the psychology, mindset and unseen battles on the path to greatness. So take a seat and learn from the Confessions of an elite athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Foreign.
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E
I'm Estad Herndon, and this is America.
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Actually, we're all talking to each other to see what did we do wrong? What did we not see?
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E
I'm in Washington, D.C. this week to interview Ruben Gallego. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona and he's been thinking openly about running for higher office, but he's recently run into some hot water because of his connection to Congressman Eric Swalwell.
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I have to learn from this, and I will learn from this. But you know, for Me, it's not a 2028 question. It's about what it means to be a better first boss in my office and also a better senator to my constituents.
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E
This week on America actually, we asked Gallego about predatory behavior in Washington, his plans for immigration reform and more.
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D
And we're back.
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E
Another thing that's changing in Hollywood is there's contraction. Right. There was a content boom, streamers are pulling back and the studios themselves are going to consolidate. Right. Paramount is just about to buy Warner Brothers. That deal will probably go through later this year. What does that mean for you? If there are. If the studios are consolidating, there's less buy.
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B
I think that's definitely. There's more on TV and less in movie theaters, for sure. So I think it's more of a more transitioning than actually shrinking. Although it is true of movies. I think there's consolidation is not good for our business, for sure. So it's ideally there would not. There would be less of it. I do think it's not quite. There are three new massive players in our business that weren't there 10 years ago. So Amazon, and now Amazon has had this big hit with Hail Mary. So I think they're very squarely in the theatrical business. Apple was in it. They went back in it with F1. There's a chance they'll come back in. And if. And if Ted, like is so believed he talked how much he's changed his mind about theatrical. So obviously they're a huge player in TV, which there wasn't, you know, there was no Netflix 15 years ago. But if they come into movies too. So I do think there are. There are new players in the space as well, which doesn't get enough attention when people are talking about consolidation. But that said, the consolidation is not good for.
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E
What will that mean for you as you're thinking about how you're going to make your next slate knowing that there used to be that there was Paramount, Warners, and now they're going to consolidate and in theory they're going to keep making as many movies as they were before.
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B
But realistically, it means working with different partners. We made a movie called Lost bus that Matthew McConaughey starred in for Apple. I don't know if anyone saw that it was on Apple, but it was a successful movie for them. Anyone seen Lost Bus? So sad. It's a great movie.
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D
Two hands.
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B
It's a Northern Californian story. It's about paradise. The fire in paradise in this bus driver.
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E
Maybe this company, Apple.
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B
30 people maybe Apple could figure out
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E
marketing at some point.
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B
Yeah, Apple really got it. Exactly. So we're working with new partners. That's one of the way to the. That's one of the ways. And we're making event. We're not making programmers anymore. We're making event horror movies. That's how we're dealing with it in the theatrical space. But then we're also very, very squarely in the television. We made Scarpetta. Anyone see that on Amazon? It's the Scarpetta based on the. Patricia Cornwall. Okay. A little more people get that show. So we're. And, you know, some. Yeah, one person. So we're branching out into television, into games, into live events. But the core business, the theatrical movie business.
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E
There is a letter that went out yesterday from a thousand influential people include, including some of them who work at Paramount and Warner, saying this deal should not go through. Do you think they're misguided to express that concern?
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B
No, I think they're right. I just don't think it's going to stop gravity.
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E
It's happening.
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B
The deal's happening. Yeah, the deal. The deal's 95% chance happening.
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E
So you wake up in the morning, go, all right, there's less studios. There used to be. That's just the way the world. Nothing I could do about it.
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B
It. Less studios, same amount of buyers.
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E
Because. Because of the new buyers.
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B
Less studios. But Amazon, Apple. Yeah, there's a. There's a new buyer. So the same amount of buyers I have. I want Apple and Netflix to get as excited about theatrical releases as Amazon, which is a small task I'm working on, but I have hope that, that, that, that, that, that, that.
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E
That town is gripped with. With excitement and a little bit of fear about AI I'm supposed to ask you about it. My guess is you're not very interested in talking about A.I.
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B
oh, I'm extremely interested in A.I. i think, and I know this is probably not a popular thing to say here, and just for this little thing, I'm not talking about medicine or the environment or coding or anything else for making of the movies and TV show. If I could wave a wand and make AI disappear, I would. I don't think it's going to be. I don't think. I don't think it's going to improve the quality of what you see in the movie theater or at home. I do not think it will do that. That said, the idea that it really bothers me when a lot of people in Hollywood just are like, we're not doing A.I. it's so crazy. It's like we're not using electricity. Like obviously AI is here, it's here to stay. It ain't going away. So our, our, our, our attitude and my attitude about it is learning about it as much as I can personally. Like, like using it a lot to figure it out and encouraging the executives at the company to do that to figure it out. And the directors. It's a personal choice. Some directors will say they'll never use AI and I'm not going to change their mind. And so we don't. But if a director wants to use AI or a filmmaker or a producer or a writer wants to use AI, I want to make sure that my company can provide information about how to do that. And so that's my, that's my, that's my.
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E
You guys did a deal with Meta to sort of play around with.
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B
We did a deal with. We made three little AI shorts for Meta. We got destroyed on Twitter for doing that. But I learned a lot. I learned a lot. I learned. I don't think I was as confident before I made those three shorts that AI would not make content better. And I was very confident after doing those three shorts that it will not for a long, long time.
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E
Once a week on Twitter there's a clip that says hey, Hollywood is cooked. And then they'll show you an AI video of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt or whatever it is.
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B
Yeah.
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E
And they say we're obviously going to make this.
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D
Hollywood's over.
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B
I have a very specific theory about this. I haven't tried it out much but I think for once, you know, creators are always. YouTube creators are always fucking killing it. And, and, and we're like people who make scripted TV show and movies have always are. Are like more and more second class citizens to Mr. Beast and DA da da. The all the growth is in creators. I think that for once the threat is much more to creators than it is to. I don't think AI for a long time is competing with watching Scarpetta or going to see the Mummy, but what it is competing with is scrolling and like on Instagram and like doom scrolling. I think there'll be a ton of AI there and you will see that. So I think for once creators have more to worry about than directors and writers.
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E
You don't think that that is competition with you as well? Because they could be scrolling.
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B
That's a thing that Netflix likes to say. We're competing with every attack. No, I am not competing with YouTube creators. I'm competing with other people who make movies and TV shows, It's a different thing.
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E
You think that some.
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B
They're eating into my market. I mean, in that way I am, but. So I guess in that way they
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E
are competing with you. They're competing for your time.
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B
Right. I can't do my job thinking, like, I'm trying to make a movie that people who love to go to the movies love and go see and make a hit movie. And like I said, making a hit movie is so elusive. So I don't think about as I'm making a movie. Like, I hope, like, the kid who watches Mr. Beast is gonna see my movie instead of watching Mr. Beast. I just can't think that way. I probably should. He probably should think that way.
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E
He probably watches a lot of Mr. Beast and then decides, no, no, of
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B
course, of course, of course, of course. But when I'm in my market competing for directors and stuff, I'm not thinking about YouTube. I'm thinking about what the horror market is and the other horror movies and how I fit into that.
- [24:04]
E
How are you thinking about getting people off the couch and into the theater today? I mean, obviously you're trying every movie. That's the goal of every movie.
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B
Well, that's what I. That's my job.
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E
That's the core of it.
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B
That's my job.
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E
That's the core of it. But what are there precepts you're thinking about? Like, okay, something they're familiar with. They've heard of the mummy. Let's make a movie about the Mummy.
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B
There are all sorts of fine lines. You walk as a. Or I walk as a. As a producer, entrepreneur. How much to say the same, how much to change, how much to lean into ip, how much to do original. Then when you even have the ip, like, how much to be faithful to the old mummy movies, how much to reinvent the Mummy and the real job? I've been thinking about this lately. Everyone always says, what does a producer do? And I think every producer, including myself, has the stupidest answer. But I think a more thoughtful answer is a producer is, like, always walking that fine line. What I do every day is walk that fine line of, is it worth paying this person this much money to do it? Or should I pay someone a little bit less to do it? And will that make the movie profitable or not? That's what I do. That's my. That's the core of what I do every day.
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E
What do you learn more from success or failure? You're very candid about.
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B
You learn much More from failure, of course.
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E
And what did you learn most recently? What's your last failure?
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B
He's alluding to Megan 2 bomb.
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E
There might have been something else.
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B
We had a big bomb with Megan 2.
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E
That was a year ago. If your last big bomb was a year ago, it's pretty good.
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C
Good.
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B
Was that a year ago? I think it was. I think it was so painful. Megan is a great example of being overconfident. Where I screwed up on my line, you know, I got. I got. I got off the line. It's. It's actually a great example. So we did this movie called Megan. It was a big hit, and we created a character, and we. We. We jumped into, like, we've created a Megan universe, and we made a cousin to the Megan. We made a sequel, and we made a cousin to the first M3gan before we had a second. You don't really have a franchise until two movies succeed. Not until you make the second movie, until the second movie works. So clearly, we should not have made a cousin to M3 Gan before we had released M3 Gan2. So that was one mistake. I didn't even talk about that. And the second thing is that we thought Megan was so successful that. And this is exactly what I was talking about before, that we could go very, very far outside the lines for M3GAN too. So the first M3GAN was kind of a horror movie that was funny. And the second M3gan was like an action comedy. It had Megan in it. But it's a great example of we stretched too far. We went too far. We went too far on a sequel. You're always thinking you don't want to make it too much like the first movie because people say you're ripping off the first movie and you don't want to make it too different from the first movie, because then people say, well, why is it a sequel? And so that's a great example of where we went. Went too far. They said, why is it a sequel? And the franchise died. But she'll live again in some other way.
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E
We predicted successfully that we would fill the time without getting to Q and A.
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B
We did it. But does anyone have a quick question? We have to stop.
- [27:07]
E
Yeah, I think we have to stop.
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B
Okay, great.
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E
Jason's hanging out.
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D
You ask some questions afterwards. Thanks again to Jason Blum. Thanks again to the Business Insider events team for putting this one on live in San Francisco show. Super fun to do it. Thanks to Charlotte Silver, who produces and edits this show. Thanks to our sponsors who bring it to you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening. Thanks to you guys for saying hi in San Francisco. See you next week.