Movies
Jason Blum Talks ‘The Invisible Man,’ Which Will Be “Lower Budget” and “Character Driven”
One of the biggest bits of horror news this year so far was that Leigh Whannell has written and will be directing a new take on The Invisible Man for Blumhouse, part of a new initiative from Universal in the wake of the failure of their Dark Universe. That entire action-heavy universe has been scrapped, with a new focus on horror and fresh voices.
In a chat with Collider this week, Jason Blum details how The Invisible Man came together, while also teasing the general tone and approach that Whannell will be taking.
“I don’t believe in saying ‘We’re going to do movies about this’ and then trying to find a movie about it,” Blum told the site, explaining that Blumhouse doesn’t (yet) plan on taking on the entirety of the Universal Monsters franchise. “So I didn’t believe in going and saying ‘I want to do all these movies’, and then try to find directors to do them. We have a director who… we’ve also done six or seven movies with, pitched us this spectacular idea about Invisible Man. We told him to write it, he wrote it, then we took it to the studio and said ‘We’d love to do this and this is what we would do with it,’ and they said yes.”
He continued, describing Whannell’s script, “It was like the Blumhouse version of The Invisible Man. It’s a lower-budget movie. It’s not dependent on special effects, CGI, stunts. It’s super character-driven. It’s really compelling. It’s thrilling. It’s edgy. It feels new. Those were all things that felt like they fit with what our company does. And it happened to be an Invisible Man story, so it checked both boxes. And we responded to it because I think Leigh is just an A+ director.”
Blum noted during the interview that the planned budget for Whannell’s The Invisible Man will very likely be between 5 million and 10 million dollars. In other words, a much safer bet than Universal’s own The Mummy back in 2017, which had a MASSIVE production budget.
Sounds like the Universal Monsters are finally on the right path, eh?
After pulling in $28 million at the worldwide box office this month, director (and star) Dev Patel’s critically acclaimed action-thriller Monkey Man is now available to watch at home.
You can rent Monkey Man for $19.99 or digitally purchase the film for $24.99!
Monkey Man is currently 88% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, with Bloody Disgusting’s head critic Meagan Navarro awarding the film 4.5/5 stars in her review out of SXSW back in March.
Meagan raves, “While the violence onscreen is palpable and painful, it’s not just the exquisite fight choreography and thrilling action set pieces that set Monkey Man apart but also its political consciousness, unique narrative structure, and myth-making scale.”
“While Monkey Man pays tribute to all of the action genre’s greats, from the Indonesian action classics to Korean revenge cinema and even a John Wick joke or two, Dev Patel’s cultural spin and unique narrative structure leave behind all influences in the dust for new terrain,” Meagan’s review continues.
She adds, “Monkey Man presents Dev Patel as a new action hero, a tenacious underdog with a penetrating stare who bites, bludgeons, and stabs his way through bodies to gloriously bloody excess. More excitingly, the film introduces Patel as a strong visionary right out of the gate.”
Inspired by the legend of Hanuman, Monkey Man stars Patel as Kid, an anonymous young man who ekes out a meager living in an underground fight club where, night after night, wearing a gorilla mask, he is beaten bloody by more popular fighters for cash. After years of suppressed rage, Kid discovers a way to infiltrate the enclave of the city’s sinister elite. As his childhood trauma boils over, his mysteriously scarred hands unleash an explosive campaign of retribution to settle the score with the men who took everything from him.
Monkey Man is produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions.
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