Movies
New Line Hires Netflix as McG’s ‘Babysitter’
Netflix is a force to be reckoned with, although I worry about the standard of quality after seeing Legendary’s god awful Spectral dumped on the streaming service last week.
The video store was my second home growing up, and we learned to decipher the good and bad films based on distributors. It became a game of cat and mouse to figure out what direct-to-VHS/DVD films were good and not just some half-baked bullshit made for a quick buck. We got really, really good at it.
Now, most of the stuff you see on streaming services, including Redbox, is trash. It’s where bad movies go to die, or go to steal people’s hard-earned money if you’re looking at some of the crap that finds its way into consumers hands through these mediums.
Netflix needs to be above this. They don’t need to pick up movies just because they were once targeted Hollywood blockbusters. Supporting Osgood Perkins’ I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House was a step in the right direction; distributing Legendary’s miserable mess, Spectral, was not.
It’s awesome that there’s this new platform to get films released, but let’s hope Netflix has higher standards and isn’t just grabbing everything put in front of them because they’re in dire need of content.
The latest surprise acquisition is that of McG’s The Babysitter, which New Line Cinema was to release (they claim they have a crowded slate). According to Variety, Netflix paid close to $10 million to own this film, which is just f’n ridiculous.
The movie stars Bella Thorne, Robbie Amell, Samara Weaving, Andrew Bachelor, Hana Mae Lee, and Judah Lewis. It follows a lonely, 12-year-old boy who falls in love with his hot babysitter only to discover that she’s part of a satanic cult that wants to kill him.
I want to believe this movie is going to be good, but it’s hard for me to believe that New Line didn’t just pass it off when they lost confidence in it. $10 million is an insane price that could cover the film’s production, and it keeps New Line from having to cover the marketing costs that would exceed that and force them to have to make $50 million at the box office in order to see a return.
Netflix is turning into an awesome option for studios, but to reiterate, I hope it’s not at the expense of the viewers….
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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