Quotes from Jason Blum

I try not to put pressure on filmmakers to come up with a big scare at the beginning. I think that helps let the audience settle in and get to know the people they're about to spend 90 minutes with. Once the scarier stuff happens, it's scarier because of that.

It's harder and harder to scare people, and filmmakers are aware of that, and they're making the movies better, and I think they feel more original, which I always like.

I love scary movies and respect the filmmakers of scary movies, and it's just as hard to make a great scary movie as it is to make a great comedy or drama or anything else.

I put more emphasis on filmmakers than maybe Hollywood does.

Great stories and acting always win the day. If the story behind the scares is dramatic and the filmmaking is great, it works. If those things aren't great and the scares are secondary, it doesn't.

It's really hard to make an original movie of any kind that succeeds in the theatrical market place, in the wide release market place.

We make movies for the cineplex. They're designed for wide release. They're designed to be seen by a lot of people and eventually make money.

We make a lot of movies that I don't think merit a wide release. We have this label called Tilt, and we have the movies come out on that, and that's fine. But it shocks me when, having done this a few times, when I really believe a movie should get a wide release, and I struggle to get it released. That does surprise me.

One of the benefits of doing low-budget movies is you don't have to release them wide to recoup. You can release it in a smaller way, make your money back, and keep going.

'The Purge' is really about America's crazy relationship to guns and guns gone wild, essentially, and it kind of laid the groundwork for 'Get Out.'

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.

I really love 'Poltergeist.' I think that's a great, terrific movie. I did really love the first 'Friday the 13th.' I thought that was such a crazy movie.

If you go to business school, and you put a product out there in the world, and it's working, the logic is to keep putting the same product out there. And I think that really bumps up against the creative process - and moviemaking, generally. And I think that our company really pushes against that.

In every art form, nothing exists in a bubble. It exists because of what came before it. A lot of bricks were laid. I think if it weren't for 'The Purge,' 'Get Out' wouldn't resonate as a mainstream movie. You push on the taste of the audience, in a way, get them used to something, and then you keep pushing on it.

You shoot yourself in the foot when you think, 'We have to get a good scary movie director to do a script by another scary movie writer.'

When people come to me with an idea and they say, 'We can do it found footage or traditional,' I always say to do it traditionally.

An effective found footage movie is much harder to make than an effective traditionally shot movie. A crappy one is much easier to make because you take your camera, and you shoot the scene, and you're done. But to make it effective, they're actually much trickier.

In big movies, interests are not aligned between those above the line 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.

Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne made very good money from both 'Insidious' movies. Word travels fast, so as soon as you have a success and do what you say you're going to do in a contract and pay out that money, we had a lot more established actors come to us and say they want to work with us.

We don't decide how a movie will be distributed until it's finished. It might be on iTunes, it might be on 3,000 theaters, but we make that decision after the fact.

When DVD disappeared but before digital distribution came on strong, there were a few years where a movie that didn't get theatrical would just be gone.

It's easy to get a theatrical release that shows in one theater for a week. But there's no advertising, and no one sees the movie. It's hard to get a real theatrical release. The distribution of independent films is, to me, extraordinarily frustrating.

I've grown to love it, but I'm not like a lot of other people who were always crazy horror fans like Eli Roth or Quentin Tarantino.

When I was working for Miramax, before Sundance, a videotape of 'The Blair Witch Project' - of the full, completed movie - went to a lot of the buyers. And so we all saw it before the festival, and I passed, a bunch of people passed... Then I watched the movie marching toward success, and was reminded by my bosses what a dope I was.