Five Favorite Films

Jason Blum’s Five Favorite Films

The Horror Mogul Alters the Question and Gives us His Five Favorite FIlms of this Year While Confessing that the Timeliness of The Purge: Election Year Was Just a Coincidence.

by Matt Atchity | September 22, 2016

Photo by Laura Cavanaugh / Stringer / Getty Images

Jason Blum and his company Blumhouse Productions are responsible for most of the theatrical horror film releases in recent years. With his hand on the wheel of popular franchises like Insidious, Sinister, The Purge, and Paranormal Activity, as well as countless others (and a few non-horror films like Whiplash), Mr. Blum is now recognized as one of the most prolific creators of horror. With the new home release of The Darkness, we at Rotten Tomatoes grew curious about his favorite films. And when we asked him, he altered the question slightly to provide us with his Five Favorite Films of this year:

Hell or High Water (2016)

97%

Definitely Jeff Bridges’ performance was what was my favorite thing about it. It was incredible.

RT: I love that movie. I have a theory that there is a four-movie quartet that includes that movie; you begin with No Country for Old Men, then move on to Hell or High Water, then The Rover, then the original Mad Max.

I like that. I like that.

RT: It’s the Downfall-of-Society Quartet.

War Dogs (2016)

62%

What I loved about War Dogs was the fact that the tone — turning that story into a spectacular two hour ride is just such a complicated thing to do. So really I thought the directing, the way that Todd [Phillips] kind of handled that movie, was just so spectacular. I loved it.

The Purge: Election Year (2016)

55%

Gotta do one of ours. The Purge: Election Year, because of the timeliness. I wish we could take credit for how timely it was, but it just happened to be extraordinarily timely, and I was very proud of that movie. Loved what James DeMonaco did on that.

RT: Yeah that’s turned into a fun little franchise. I shouldn’t say little, but there are a lot of people I know looking forward to more Purge movies.

Compared to Avengers, yes, we’re working on that. We’re working on purging [laughing].

Before the Flood (2016)

76%

I saw a terrific movie last night called Before the Flood, which is [Leonardo] DeCaprio’s movie about global warming, which is spectacular. It’s amazing — really, really amazing. Really blew me away, I thought it was incredible.

Kicks (2016)

85%

It’s a small independent movie; it was directed by the people who wrote a movie that we did called Lowriders, which we’re actually releasing next May. This is the movie they did before Lowriders, and it’s a very small indie story, but I just thought it was incredibly well done. I think they spent $100,000 on the movie, and I just really loved it.

Rotten Tomatoes: I saw that you guys were out at Toronto International Film Festival. Were you out there with The Belko Experiment?

Jason Blum: I was. We picked up Belko and I went to go watch it screen at midnight. It screened really well. It’s really fun and we picked it up. We’re going to release it next year, so I’m really psyched about that. It’s a great, crazy movie.

The Darkness is now available for home release.