Does the world need another take on The Blair Witch Project? The groundbreaking 1999 movie, which starred Michael C. Williams, Joshua Leonard, and Rai Hance (then known as Heather Donahue), was lightning in a bottle, filmed for an estimated $60,000 during a famously grueling eight-day, oft-improvised shoot. It was a box office blockbuster, with a $248-million-plus theatrical release and two sequels—three, if you count the revival horror-on-the-cheap expert Jason Blum announced a little more than a week ago. That latest news frustrated the Blair Witch originals, who released an open letter Saturday asking for belated compensation for their long-ago work.
“So, this is MY face on a press release for a film being made by two major studios,” Leonard wrote on April 11, sharing an Instagram post from Variety. (I should note here that the item Leonard referenced was not a press release, it was a news report from CinemaCon, where Blum announced the reboot as part of a partnership with Lionsgate, which owns the Blair Witch IP.) “I didn’t know anything about it until a friend sent me a ‘congrats’ screenshot yesterday.”
According to Leonard, after the film’s success, the main cast was each paid $300,000 “as a buyout for our ownership points … and NEVER saw another dime.”
“I’m so proud of our little punk-rock movie, and I LOVE the fans who keep the flames burning,” Leonard said of the film. “But at this point, it’s 25 years of disrespect from the folks who’ve pocketed the lion’s share (pun intended) of the profits from OUR work, and that feels both icky and classless.” (Vanity Fair reached out to Lionsgate for comment but has not received a response as of publication time.)
In a post the next day, Leonard clarified that “Money isn’t the point” of his prior post, and acknowledged that “We signed contracts when we were kids, with no legal or union support. We were struggling artists, and the fact that we didn’t have to worry about food/rent for a while was as big a win as any of us could’ve dreamed of.” In the days since, Leonard has posted a number of text interactions with Lionsgate PR, writing late last week that “While we still might not be on the exact same page, I’m deeply grateful to finally feel acknowledged and respected in this matter.”
On Saturday, Leonard—in an open letter he co-signed by Williams and Hance—made some concrete requests of Lionsgate. Primarily, he wrote, the trio would like “Retroactive + future residual payments to Heather, Michael and Josh for acting services rendered in the original BWP, equivalent to the sum that would’ve been allotted through SAG-AFTRA, had we had proper union or legal representation when the film was made.”
Next, they’d like “Meaningful consultation on any future Blair Witch reboot, sequel, prequel, toy, game, ride, escape room, etc.,” that uses the original cast’s names or likenesses.
Finally, they propose that Lionsgate fund what they’re calling “The Blair Witch Grant.” The $60,000 grant would go to “an unknown/aspiring genre filmmaker to assist in making their first feature film.” (The figure is representative of the $60,000 budget of the original film, Leonard notes, and is arguably a conservative ask—according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, that $60,000 then is equivalent to over $114K, today.)
“This is a GRANT, not a development fund,” he writes, so Lionsgate “will not own any of the underlying rights to the project.”
In a subsequent social media post, Leonard writes that that open letter and the attention it generated are “phase 3ish of 13ish.”
“We’re just getting started, and have LOTS of runway left to cover,” he writes of his and his castmates’ efforts. And perhaps this scrappy trio has a chance (more of a chance, perhaps, than their fictional counterparts had in Burkittsville). After all, even folks like Jason Blum seem aware of the magic the original team produced.
“I’m a huge admirer of The Blair Witch Project, which brought the idea of found footage horror to mainstream audiences and became a true cultural phenomenon,” Blum said when his reboot plans were announced.
“I don’t think there would have been a Paranormal Activity,” Blum said of his studio’s massively lucrative found footage franchise. “had there not first been a Blair Witch.”
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