You will believe that a film student can stand facing a wall … again.
For the first time in a decade, there’s a new Blair Witch movie in production. Lionsgate and Atomic Monster announced today that a new Blair Witch Project, based on the iconic found-footage horror movie of 1999, is officially in the works, and scheduled for release in the fall of 2027.
They made the release in the most Blair Witch way possible: On the internet! their official Instagram accounts revealed the release date in a video with the numbers “9 24 27” made out of twigs, a la the classic stick figure from the original Blair Witch Project and its ingenious marketing campaign.
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The Blair Witch Project remains one of the most profitable films in Hollywood history. Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, the movie assumed the form of a real documentary about a trio of college students who went missing in the woods in Maryland while searching for evidence about a notorious local legend called the Blair Witch.
Powered by an ingenious and innovative ad campaign that successfully passed off the movie as a legit documentary for a while, and used the Internet in ways basically no movie prior had ever done, the little independent, which was originally made for well under $1 million, wound up grossing almost $250 million worldwide. Its success helped popularize the found footage subgenre of horror, which continues to this day.
But despite The Blair Witch Project’s massive success, none of the subsequent attempts to continues the series have worked at the box office. First came Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, just one year later, which was not a found footage movie, and grossed about a fifth of what its predecessor made in theaters.
Then in 2016 there was Blair Witch, which was a “secret” sequel that was initially announced and marketed as a horror film called The Woods. It was only at its first public screenings at Comic-Con that year that Lionsgate revealed that the movie was, in fact, a sequel to the original Blair Witch Project, with some modern twists on the found footage conceit. That movie made even less in theaters than Book of Shadows 16 years earlier.
But maybe this movie will be the one to break the real Blair Witch curse. It will be directed by YouTuber Dylan Clark. The new Blair Witch Project project is now scheduled to premiere in theaters on September 24, 2027.
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