Background

Blum was born on February 20, 1969, in Los Angeles, California. He is the son of influential art dealer Irving Blum, whose Ferus Gallery gave Andy Warhol his first West Coast solo exhibition in 1962. “My dad was a massive risk-taker,” Blum says. “He had no money, and he really bet on himself, which is what we do.” When Jason was a kid, his dad was living in New York, and the Soup Cans hung in his living room on the Upper East Side—all 32 paintings, in four rows of eight. When he stayed at his father’s, Jason would sometimes sleep on the sofa beneath the Warhols.

It was a childhood immersed in art history—in real time. His mother Shirley Neilsen was an art historian and professor at the State University of New York in Purchase and one of the co-founders of Ferus. Blum’s parents split when he was four years old; he lived with his mother in Dobbs Ferry, in Westchester County, during the school year, and with his father on holidays and in the summer. His mother was previously married to museum director Walter Hopps.

Education

Blum was entrepreneurial from the start. He went to boarding school at Taft, in Connecticut, then to Vassar, where Noah Baumbach was his roommate. He is a 1991 graduate of Vassar College.

Career

Blum worked for Bob and Harvey Weinstein as an executive producer and later as an independent producer for Warner Bros. He also was working as a producing director at Ethan Hawke's Malaparte theater company.

He obtained financing for his first film as producer, Kicking and Screaming (1995), after receiving a letter from family acquaintance, entertainer Steve Martin, who endorsed the script. Blum attached the letter to copies of the script he sent around to Hollywood executives.

In 2000, he founded Blumhouse Productions, which specializes in producing micro-budget movies that give directors full creative control over the projects. Some of the films produced by Blum have been highly profitable, including horror film Paranormal Activity which was made for $15,000 and earned nearly $200 million. NPR's Planet Money did a special podcast about how Blum's production house gets its success.

Blum also produced Insidious (2010), Sinister (2012), The Purge (2013), and Creep (2014), all of which had successful sequels. In 2014, he served as an executive producer on the television film The Normal Heart, which went on to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie, and produced the feature films Whiplash and Get Out, both of which earned him nominations for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Before Blumhouse, Blum served as co-head of the Acquisitions and Co-Productions department at Miramax Films in New York. At Miramax, he was instrumental in acquiring over 50 films including The Others, Smoke Signals, A Walk On the Moon and The House of Yes.

Blum has produced over 75 films and TV series throughout his career. His credits also include: The Reader, for which Kate Winslet won an Academy Award; Hysterical Blindness, starring Uma Thurman, which aired on HBO and garnered Thurman a Golden Globe Award; and Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke, Bill Murray, Sam Shepard and Kyle MacLachlan.

Achievements

• 

  Emmy award winning producer, Jason Blum is the founder and CEO of Blumhouse Productions, a multi-media production company that has pioneered a new model of studio filmmaking- producing high-quality micro-budget films. Blumhouse has a first-look deal with Universal Pictures and has produced the highly-profitable Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Insidious, and Sinister franchises which have grossed more than $1.2 billion worldwide on combined budgets under $40 million. Blumhouse's model began with the original Paranormal Activity, which was made for $15,000 and grossed close to $200 million worldwide, making it the most profitable film in Hollywood history. Blumhouse's award-winning projects include The Normal Heart and Whiplash.
  
  Jason Blum won the 2014 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie for producing The Normal Heart, and has received two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Picture for producing Whiplash and Get Out.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • Watch Tooth Fairy

    (Tooth Fairy is a 2010 Canadian-American fantasy comedy fa...)

  • Watch Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension

    (Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension is a 2015 Americ...)

    2015
  • Amityville: The Awakening: Bella Thorne, Cameron Monaghan, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jennifer Morrison: Amazon Digital Services LLC

    (Amityville: The Awakening is a 2017 American supernatural...)

    2017
  • Hamlet

    (Hamlet, also known as Hamlet 2000, is a 2000 American dra...)

    2000
  • Watch Blumhouse's Truth or Dare

    (Blumhouse's Truth or Dare or simply Truth or Dare, is a 2...)

    2018
  • The Accidental Husband

    (The Accidental Husband is a 2008 American romantic comedy...)

  • The Reader

    (The Reader is a 2008 German-American romantic drama film ...)

  • Fever

    (Fever is a 2004 psychological drama film produced by HBO ...)

  • Insidious

    (Insidious is a 2010 supernatural horror film directed by ...)

    2010
  • Watch Paranormal Activity 4

    (Paranormal Activity 4 is a 2012 American found footage su...)

    2012
  • Watch The Babymakers

    (The Babymakers is a 2012 American comedy film directed by...)

    2012
  • Watch Paranormal Activity 2

    (Paranormal Activity 2 is a 2010 American found footage su...)

    2010
  • Paranormal Activity

    (Paranormal Activity is a 2007 American supernatural horro...)

  • Watch Paranormal Activity 3

    (Paranormal Activity 3 is a 2011 American found footage su...)

    2011
  • Kicking and Screaming

    (Kicking and Screaming is a 1995 American comedy-drama fil...)

    1995
  • Griffin & Phoenix

    (Griffin & Phoenix is a 2006 American romance film produce...)

  • Watch The Boy Next Door

    (The Boy Next Door is a 2015 American erotic thriller-horr...)

    2015
  • The Adventures Of Tom Thumb And Thumbelina

    (The Adventures of Tom Thumb and Thumbelina is a 2002 dire...)

  • Watch Get Out

    (Get Out is a 2017 American horror film written and direct...)

    2017
  • Sinister

    (Sinister is a 2012 American supernatural horror film co-w...)

    2012
  • Watch Upgrade

    (Upgrade is a 2018 cyberpunk action body horror film writt...)

    2018
  • The FP

    (The FP is a 2011 American comedy film written and directe...)

    2011
  • Watch 13 Sins

    (13 Sins is a 2014 American horror-thriller film directed ...)

    2014
  • Watch Lawless

    (Lawless is a 2012 American crime drama film directed by J...)

    2012

Politics

Blum, who makes his own views clear on his Twitter feed, had said the politics in his films should be secondary to the entertainment, but clearly that has changed. “As an American, I feel completely trapped,” he says. “So does over 50% of the country. And one of the ways to get out of that trap is to make movies about it. So certainly the messages have come more to the surface. Every time there’s a shooting in the Unites States, there’s a loud voice that says the way to avoid a shooting is to pile more guns into the world. The president thinks teachers should carry guns in schools, which is just preposterous. The notion of The Purge, when we started, was this fantastical idea. But because we have a wacko for a President, it seems a lot less outlandish now.”

Views

In his own words, his formula for making movies as inexpensively as possible does not mean looking for low-budget movies to see if he likes them, but looking for movies he likes, and then see if they can be done on a low budget.

His rules for making a cheap movie include: 1) Limit the amount of speaking parts, because actors with lines get an additional fee; 2) Limit the amount of locations (preferably only one); 3) Pay actors the legally minimum, and offer them a percentage of perspective profits; 4) Never break the budget, don't ask for more money ("don't buy your way out of a problem, but solve it creatively").

In 2018, Blum said in an interview that the reason no woman had ever directed one of his horror films was that "there are not a lot of female directors (...) and even less who are inclined to do horror". After much criticism on social media, in which lists of such directors were circulated, he apologized for what he called his "dumb comments".

Quotations: “The first thing I learned as a producer is that you have very little control over the life of a project. Anything can stall a film, from financing to scheduling to casting. Things fall apart all the time. Try to have as many projects going at one time as you can handle.”

“We don’t have the money to build sets, so we don’t build them. There are few exceptions, but very rarely will we do a build. And I think that’s great. It’s better for the actors; it makes it feel more real. I think the restraints that shooting practically puts on production makes the movie better, even though it makes it harder to shoot.”

“In big movies, interests are not aligned between those above the line (actors, director, producers, writers) and the financier, because above the line gets paid whether the movie works or not. The financier only makes money if the movie works, and that fundamentally sets up a contentious relationship. What I love about low-budget movies is my interests and the director’s interests and the actors’ interests are aligned. No one makes money unless the movie works, and that informs every creative decision.”

“Most of the most successful films Blumhouse has made have been rejected by everyone else. No one wanted to make GET OUT. Nobody. Nobody wanted to make THE PURGE.”

“There’s a leadership crisis (in big studios) because the world of media is fracturing and changing at lightning speed, and the platforms are changing and the rules are changing, so there’s an enormous amount of disruption. I don’t think that’s personnel as much as it is the studio model being attacked. It has to reinvent itself.”

“When something is really different, I think people are frightened of it; when something is really innovative and new, and you can’t compare it to anything else, it’s hard for those things to find a home. It’s not an accident that BLAIR WITCH and PARANORMAL had a similar history.”

“If you are still thinking about a script after five or ten years, that’s a sign that it’s good — not that it’s stale. And the opposite is true — if everyone wants to make your movie, that’s a sign that it probably sucks.”

“You can’t control what people take from what they see, and movies first and foremost need to be entertaining. At least for the movies we make. The minute you start making movies that are just lessons, no one sees them anymore.”

“The longer you are in the business, the more material comes your way. It becomes easy after a while to get lazy and dismiss everything as garbage. You have to find a way to focus on areas that show promise. Every script is a work in progress — it’s a blueprint for something else.”

“What do we look for in a scary movie? Something you haven’t seen before. Does it feel original? And if it does, why? What’s different about it?”

“If you’re making a movie for young people or you want young people to enjoy it, too, you have to make it PG-13. If you make a movie about high school kids, like OUIJA, you can’t then tell them they can’t go see it.”

“A theatrical release is not the be all and end all… We intentionally make all our movies without a release strategy — which removes the pressure on a filmmaker that goes along with making a wide-release film. We finish the film, screen it and then decide what lane the movie will take.”

On why horror films do well theatrically “People really like to be scared with other people. It’s a pretty inexpensive thrill ride compared to Magic Mountain or Disneyland.”

“Being snobby about the kind of storytelling people do irks me. In fact, it’s one of the things that drives me to make as many horror movies as I do. I love horror movies. I’m proud of horror movies. I love working in horror, and I’d love to make horror movies for a long time to come.”

Personality

Jason loves Halloween.

Physical Characteristics: Height - 6' 2" (1,88 m)

Jason Blum is in great shape.

Interests

• Artists

  Andy Warhol

Connections

On July 14, 2012, Blum married journalist Lauren A.E. Schuker in Los Angeles in a Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness ceremony. They have one daughter, Roxy Blum.

Father:

Irving Blum

Mother:

Shirley Neilsen Blum

She was an art historian and professor at the State University of New York in Purchase and one of the co-founders of Ferus.

Spouse:

Lauren Schuker

She is a staff writer in Los Angeles for The Wall Street Journal, specializing in features and real estate articles. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received a master’s degree in the history of art from the Courtauld Institute in London.

Daughter:

Roxy Blum

colleague:

Jordan Peele

(born February 21, 1979)

He is an American filmmaker, showrunner and actor.

References

• The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares: The Haunted City
• Blumhouse Productions: From Paranormal Activity to Get Out