Last year Blumhouse founder Jason Blum indicated that there were no real plans for further entries in the “Paranormal Activity” franchise which helped launch his company.
The festival sensation first arrived in the late 2000s and helped fuel a found footage craze with films like “Monster,” “Cloverfield,” “District 9,” “REC,” “The Last Exorcism,” “Apollo 18,” “The Devil Inside” and “VHS” all hitting in subsequent years.
The franchise seemingly fizzled out with 2015’s sixth entry “Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension”. Now, six years later, we know that it is getting a full reboot.
Speaking with Collider this week, Blum surprisingly confirmed that the still-untitled movie is in fact already finished: “The movie’s done. Yeah, we did it.”
Blum confirms the film has been directed by Will Eubank (“Underwater”) and penned by Christopher Landon (“Happy Death Day,” “Freaky”) and why he changed his mind on bringing back the franchise is so they could do something new with it:
“Paramount wanted to continue Paranormal Activity, I probably would have left it alone. So they wanted to continue it, but I thought if they were gonna continue it, you gotta – it was tired, there was no way to continue the road that we’d been down.
So I really encouraged all the creative people involved to think of something new. A lot of people who are going to go see the new Paranormal Activity were 3 years old when the first Paranormal Activity came out, so they don’t even know from those older movies.
I thought if you were going to re-do it, you better really re-do it, not try and expand what we did all those years ago.”
All we do know about it is that the cast includes Emily Bader, Roland Buck III, Dan Lippert, and Henry Ayres-Brown. It is also set to premiere on the Paramount+ service by the end of 2021.
Blum has also revealed the company has no plans on rebooting cult classic “Halloween III: Season of the Witch”.
Despite being the third instalment of John Carpenter’s “Halloween” franchise, the 1982 film is a completely standalone original feature with no connection to the Michael Myers story.
Carpenter and Debra Hill produced the film about children’s Halloween masks designed to sacrifice those who wear them. Tommy Lee Wallace served as writer/director on this and later went on to pen and direct both “Fright Night Part 2” and the “IT” mini-series.
Upon release, it was torn apart by critics and fans and nearly ended the franchise. In recent years though it has been re-evaluated more on its own terms. However, Blum tells the outlet they won’t be taking the anthological approach again to the “Halloween” legacy:
“My shepherding of Halloween – hopefully not, but currently, it’s done after the three movies. So you’ll have to ask my partner-in-crime Malek Akkad who will do Halloween from now until the end of time… he may do that, but not for me. Too hard – well, I won’t go into it, but I wouldn’t do that with Halloween.”
Blumhouse has “Halloween Kills” due out October 15th and the still to film “Halloween Ends” coming next October 14th 2022.