BLAIR WITCH: Why Adam Wingard’s Found Footage Reboot Failed
I really dug director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett’s The Blair Witch Project reboot/sequel Blair Witch. At least I dug the last 20 minutes, I mean.
Also Read: Exclusive: Adam Wingard Still Won’t Explain the Ending to 2016’s BLAIR WITCH and Here’s Why He Never Will
But anyway, today Barrett talked a bit more about why he thinks the film failed.
Barrett tells Collider: “The short version is we made a film in secret that it turned out, we made for about 300 people.”
He continues: “Ultimately, a lot of people are just sick of found footage. A lot of people still don’t like the original Blair Witch Project and are still mad about it, and they don’t want a sequel. And all the people who do love The Blair Witch Project also didn’t want a sequel, and they have very complicated feelings about the previous one. So we were kind of in this little niche market of people that wanted a very sincere sequel to the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project.”
Also Read: Why (the Last 20 Minutes of) Adam Wingard’s Blair Witch Scared the Hell Out Of Me
He adds: “Because we made it in secret, we never stopped to ask if anyone liked this idea or wanted this or thought what we were doing was a good idea… So Blair Witch is a film that if we had tested it at an early stage, conceptually, I think a lot of red flags would have come up and we would have realized, ‘Oh, people don’t understand that we’re not, for example, saying that we’re directly showing the witch.’ And by the way, our credits are misleading, which we didn’t realize either.”
Finally, he says: “In hindsight, it’s impossible to say what people wanted… I think a lot of people were hoping Adam and I were doing an original horror movie and we didn’t realize that.”
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