The new “Blair Witch Project” movie from Lionsgate has been set for a September 24, 2027 release. The date was unveiled in a cryptic video on social media.
Back in 2024, the original cast of “The Blair Witch Project” — Heather Donahue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard — released a joint statement directed at Lionsgate, asking for retroactive and future residual payments for their roles in the original film. The short version: they could have made several million dollars each, but more than 20 years ago signed away the rights to the franchise for $300,000 apiece.
Lionsgate recently announced that two members of the original cast, Joshua Leonard and Michael Williams, will serve as executive producers on the upcoming “Blair Witch” reboot, alongside the first film’s directing team of Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick, and Gregg Hale. Heather Donahue declined to return, saying she was offered an agreement that “personally raised difficult long-term questions about rights, future technological use of identity and voice, the ability to speak freely, and compensation.”
Dylan Clark is set to direct the reboot. His credits include “Transfigure,” “Home Movies,” and “Seagrass.” The budget is reportedly in the $10M range. Chris Devlin (“Cobweb”) wrote the original script, with a current rewrite by Clark. Atomic Monster’s James Wan and Blumhouse’s Jason Blum are producing.
There have been three “Blair Witch” movies released so far, with the original still standing as the only truly good one — and arguably the only one that mattered. That 1999 lightning strike reshaped the horror landscape and helped popularize the found-footage boom that followed. The last time we heard from this franchise, Adam Wingard essentially ran it into the ground with 2016’s “Blair Witch.”
As I wrote a few weeks ago, “I’m skeptical about the whole thing, as ‘Blair Witch,’ made for under $60,000, was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment that captured the zeitgeist in ways very few films manage. It is quite simply the most influential horror film of the last 25 years.”
Word is that the reboot begins production this fall — given the budget, this is a fairly low-risk undertaking on the part of Wan, Blum, and Lionsgate. They have nothing to lose here. They might as well see if the IP can somehow be revived for a whole new generation of audiences.
Scratch the 50/50. It's more like 70% mixed-to-negative from what I've seen, but it's got a few defenders, which leaves me very curious.