Lionsgate announced Thursday that original Blair Witch Project directors Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick and stars Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams have joined an upcoming reboot as executive producers.
Key Points
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They join the project after a years-long battle against the studio by the actors.
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Leonard, Williams, and Rei Hance, previously known as Heather Donahue, had accused the studio of "reprehensible" exploitation of their involvement.
The originalBlair Witch Projectfamily is (almost) back together again, after years of acrimony.
Directors Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, producer Gregg Hale, as well as stars Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams, have officially boarded Lionsgate's upcoming reboot of the horror classic as executive producers, per an announcement shared withEntertainment Weeklyon Thursday.
Excepting one crucial third of the original cast triumvirate — Rei Hance, formerly known as Heather Donahue — theBlair Witchteam appears to have patched up a protracted row that the original stars had with Lionsgate, which Leonardonce accusedof "reprehensible" exploitation.
Lionsgate and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster, the recently conglomerated hub formed by Jason Blum and James Wan's production companies, celebrated Sánchez, Myrick, Hale, Leonard, and Williams' involvement as "bringing the full mythology and legacy of the franchise to a new generation of storytelling."
Thursday's announcement also named the long-gestating reboot's director — Dylan Clark, a popular horror creator on YouTube who recently signed with Universal to adapt his horror short "Portrait of God." That forthcoming feature will be produced by an all-star team including Sam Raimi and Jordan Peele.
Chris Devlin wrote the screenplay for the as-yet untitled "new imagining" ofTheBlair Witch Project, with a rewrite from Clark. Devlin previously penned the 2022Texas Chain Saw Massacrereboot, as well as the 2023 horror filmCobweb.
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The Blair Witch Projectbecame a creative and commercial phenomenon when it opened theatrically in the summer of 1999. The micro-budget, formally experimental, deep-woods thriller contained no ghosts or ghouls, no vampires or werewolves, really nothing but three scared teenagers wandering in the woods for two hours. Yet it grossed nearly $250 million at the global box office.
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But as the years passed, and as Hollywood did what it does best — endlessly proliferateBlair Witch's IP into sequels, books, comics, video games, and merchandise — the film's cast began to speak up.
The original film was distributed in the U.S. by Artisan Entertainment, which merged in 2003 with Lions Gate Entertainment to become the mini-major studio known simply today as Lionsgate. In a 2015 oral history of the film forThe Week, theBlair Witch's stars and directors painted a picture of creative differences that led to a rushed sequel, 2000'sBook of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.
They eventually lost control of the franchise, or as Sánchez put it, "We lost our innocence." Leonard noted, "I think some people might be a little bitter about the experience. I will say that we had what I have discovered was an incredibly classless experience with Artisan."
Those feelings only deepened as theBlair Witchmachine kept pumping out products, largely without their input, or to their benefit. Leonard released ablistering public statementin 2024 when Lionsgate announced a reboot of the original film, without any of its core creative team involved.
"At this point, it's 25 years of disrespect from the folks who've pocketed the lion's share (pun intended) of the profits from OUR work, and that feels both icky and classless," he wrote onFacebook. All three cast members spoke toVarietythat same year, where Hance claimed they'd been "cut out of something that we were intimately involved with creating," and Leonard said Lionsgate's "behavior has been reprehensible."
Entertainment Weeklyhas reached out to reached out to representatives for Lionsgate and Hance for comment.
The next chapter in theBlair Witch Projectfranchise does not yet have an official release date.
Read the original article onEntertainment Weekly