10 Films That Helped Blumhouse Take Over Cinema
2. Whiplash
Wait, this is a Blumhouse movie?!
Anyone would be forgiven for thinking that a prestige drama that scooped three Oscar wins from five nominations is not the usual Jason Blum project. However, Blumhouse played a key part in helping Damien Chazelle transform his original screenplay into a short film that would help him secure financing for the feature.
The movie follows Miles Teller as an aspiring jazz drummer who is confronted with the perfectionist tendencies of a ferocious conductor, played by an Oscar-winning and loathsome JK Simmons. He's a man with more putdowns than Malcolm Tucker in a rap battle with Bianca Del Rio. The movie culminates in a bravura improvised musical performance that sees a grudging respect emerge between the two alpha males.
Whiplash confirmed that Blumhouse is not just a scare factory, dealing in things that go bump in the night and genre tropes. Blum's abilities go beyond sniffing out emerging genre talent and, with Whiplash, he hitched himself to a rising star who would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Director with his next film - La La Land.
And now, to the movie that solidified Blumhouse's more serious credentials...