A major reason theater is experiencing a crisis right now is that everything has gotten gigantic. Regional theaters build $125M theaters with a staff of hundreds, and they do so with other people’s money: grants, contributions, government funds. We see the same trend in film, where studios only know how to swing for the stands with big-budget franchise movies.

This is why my recent discovery of an interview with filmmaker Jason Blum grabbed my attention. Blum, whose hits include Get Out, is known for making low-budget films, many of them in the horror genre, by choice. Bryce Roberts, in his Medium article “The Low Budget Startup,” led me to several other interviews with Blum in which he promotes his business model. A 2017 New York Times article by Ryan Bradley entitled “The Scarily Profitable Hits of Jason Blum” drops this fact:

Blumhouse’s own “Paranormal Activity,” shot in one house with two unknown actors and almost no crew, cost just $15,000, yet its box-office return since its 2009 release has been $193 million, a return on investment of about 1.3 million percent.

Listen to his interview on the “Future of Film with Alex Stolz” podcast and, as Bryce Roberts summarized, you find a vigorous and thoughtful defense of his business model. Roberts provides this list (with my emphasis added):

• Low budgets reduce risk and retain control
• Lower budgets lower the stakes
• Low budgets give you the freedom to say yes to risky/edgy/weird/cool stuff
• Low budgets let us work with incredible scripts and amazing artists that the big studios have passed over. They have something to prove
• Low-budget movies get better because they can’t rely on special effects or other expensive tricks
• If your job depends on big success your decisions won’t be bold, they’ll be vanilla
• The hardest thing to make is an edgy movie with a $200M budget
• Big budgets mean more people and more competing interests
• Infinite resources breed laziness

In addition, for many years Blum did not seek out outside investors, instead he self-funded, which allowed him complete artistic and financial control. He wasn’t answering to investors, boards of directors, or anyone else. Even now, most of his projects are budgeted between $5M and $10M, and when he seeks outside money now (because he’s producing more films than in the past), he doesn’t pay himself up front. Instead, he shares the risk with the investor—if a film doesn’t make a profit, Blum won’t be paid.

So how might Blum’s ideas apply to the theater?

August 27, 2023