It is no coincidence that the horror renaissance has coincided with the rise of Blumhouse Productions. Jason Blum's production company has put out some of the most successful and acclaimed horror movies in recent years, conferring a certain level of cachet to any horror film bearing the Blumhouse Productions name. This fall, Blumhouse gets in the franchise revival game with Halloween, but that iconic series isn't the only one ripe for a proper return. Jason Blum would also love to take on those two most '90s of horror properties, Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, as he explained:
I would like to do both of them, but it's a rights situation with all those movies. It's very tangled and very complicated. It's one thing to say you want to do them and it's a whole other thing to get to actually do it.
To those hoping that a Blumhouse Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer revival were in the offing, this will come as a bit of a disappointment. On the bright side, it doesn't seem like it is a lack of desire or enthusiasm for those properties that is preventing Jason Blum and Co. from taking them on. As it often is, business matters stand in the way of something we might like to see. As Jason Blum told Forbes, Blumhouse doesn't have the rights to those properties to be able to make new movies, even if he might want to. Apparently the rights issues are complicated as well, which makes it sound like he's looked into it. So unless the rights are sorted out, at the moment it seems that Blumhouse cannot legally bring back Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
If nothing else, Jason Blum seems keen on the idea of bringing back these two meta-horror properties, and perhaps he will get the chance to do so at some point. In this age of reboots, where nostalgia and brand recognition are highly valuable and there is money being left on the table now, it seems only a matter of time before these properties, which are only a little over 20 years old, get brought back for more bloodletting. In fact, a few years back, Sony was reported to be shining the hook for a reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer, to be written and produced by Oculus and Gerald's Game writer-director Mike Flanagan. Obviously that never came to fruition.
Although there are some business realities preventing Blumhouse from taking on these two horror properties at the moment, it would be the place for them to make their comeback. Halloween is not out yet, but the early reviews out of the Toronto International Film Festival are largely positive, indicating that David Gordon Green's film is the best in the series since the 1978 original. So given what looks to be a success, hopes would be high for Blumhouse to be able to replicate that with Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
Blumhouse's Halloween slashes into theaters on October 19. For all of 2018's biggest movies still to come, check out our release schedule, and if you like scary movies, stay tuned to CinemaBlend.
