If you’re one of those people who complains that Hollywood makes too many remakes and sequels, I implore you to look at what movies you are spending money on movie tickets for. Some of the biggest upcoming 2025 movies, like Superman, How To Train Your Dragon and Jurassic World: Rebirth, will likely be among the moneymakers of the year because audiences put their money into them. If you’re interested in showing the industry you value original movies, look no further than the work of Drop’s Christopher Landon.
From the Happy Death Day movies to Freaky to We Have A Ghost, the writer, director and producer has been behind what feels like a record number of movies these days without an IP behind it. When I spoke to Landon about accomplishing this throughout his career, here’s what he had to say:
You hit something really important, which is, it is very hard to make original films right now. I think everyone in Hollywood especially is very obsessed with remakes and IPs and all these other things. I'm very fortunate that I have such an amazing partnership with Blumhouse and Universal, who are very supportive of original movies and, especially Blumhouse, where I think they're big risk takers. I think an advantage is that our movies are relatively inexpensive and so we can afford to be a little bit more risky.
As Landon put it, he feels grateful for his longtime collaboration with Blumhouse and Universal, which have not only been behind a number of his projects, but created all sorts of original movies and IPs in recent years. When Blumhouse started in the early '00s, they delivered the Paranormal Activity movies before also making films like Insidious, Sinister, The Purge, Oculus, Get Out and Us.
And as Landon commented on, one huge draw to these is how inexpensive they generally are for the studios. As Landon continued:
I'm really hoping that audiences will come out and support original movies, because otherwise there won't be any new franchises. We're gonna be trapped in old ones.
The studio’s latest is Drop, which follows a single mother going on her first 'first date' in a while when she gets a series of drops to her phone from an unknown person threatening to kill her family if she doesn’t follow their requests. Here’s how the movie, which critics have deemed a good time, came to Landon’s desk in this instance, per the director:
So the producers brought the script to me, it was sort of, it was based on something that happened to them. They were at dinner on vacation and somebody was airdropping them stuff and they tried to figure out who was doing it. And they never did, but they walked away with this idea, and then they found the writers, Chris and Jill, and then they turned it into a thriller.
If you’ve been to a very public event, you might have experienced this yourself, A feature created to have one phone give a picture to another has been used in the wrong ways for people to be given Shrek memes and so forth. In the instance of Drop, there’s a fun whodunnit element as you watch the movie and feel like you are experiencing it with Meghann Fahy’s Violet as she goes on a date with Brandon Sklenar’s Henry. Landon also said this:
[When] I read the first draft of the script, it was like hot off the press and they thought of me, I read it, I loved it and I immediately sort of put on my writer hat and I worked with the writers and we kind of rolled our sleeves up and got into it, and then sort of slowly pushed the movie forward.
When Landon signed on to be part of Drop, he had recently gone through a “dark and tumultuous” time that led him to quit his work as Scream 7’s director following Melissa Barrera being fired and Jenna Ortega exiting the project after her. Landon shared that he decided to quit contributing to the major horror franchise because death threats were being sent to him and his family, to the point that “the FBI was getting involved.” He called the whole thing “highly aggressive and really scary.”
When it comes to a landscape of upcoming horror movies that are remakes or sequels, it’s refreshing to see Landon continue to bring fresh ideas into movie theaters with Drop. Plus, he’ll be continuing his own franchise of Happy Death Day back with the in-the-works threequel. Check out Drop in theaters on Friday, April 11.
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