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.
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.
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00:00It is very hard to make original films right now.
00:03You know, I think everyone, Hollywood especially, is very obsessed with remakes and IP and all these other things, you know.
00:10And I'm very fortunate that I have such an amazing partnership with Blumhouse and Universal,
00:17who are very supportive, I think, of original movies and, you know, especially Blumhouse where I think they're big risk takers.
00:24You know, I think an advantage is that our movies are relatively inexpensive, you know,
00:29and so we can afford to be a little bit more risky.
00:33But I'm really hoping that audiences will come out and support original movies
00:39because otherwise there won't be any new franchises.
00:42You know, we're going to be trapped in old ones.
00:44What were the challenges involved in making this, like, original film?
00:47Yeah. So the producers brought the script to me.
00:51It was based on something that happened to them.
00:55They were at dinner on vacation and somebody was airdropping them stuff and they tried to figure out who was doing it.
01:03And they never did, but they walked away with this idea.
01:05And then they found the writers, Chris and Jill, and then they turned it into a thriller.
01:10And then I read the first draft of the script. It was, like, hot off the press.
01:13And they thought of me. And I read it. I loved it.
01:17I immediately sort of put on my writer hat and I worked with the writers
01:21and we kind of rolled our sleeves up and got into it and then sort of slowly pushed the movie forward.
01:26Okay.