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Why Jason Blum Jokes That Taylor Swift "Almost Caused Him to Get Divorced"
When Taylor Swift claimed the mid-October weekend for her Eras Tour movie, it threw everyone's release dates.
Would you rather sabotage your movie or your marriage? That's the tricky decision Jason Blum, founder of horror movie production company Blumhouse, faced, and thanks to a very unlikely saboteur: Taylor Swift.
For context: Most movies set their release dates far in advance and try not to open against other "big" movies so that they can, at least, open number-one for their weekend. And Blum was thrilled to claim the middle of October for The Exorcist: Believer because, as he put it on Late Night with Seth Meyers, “Friday the 13th in October is the single greatest day to release a horror movie, and it only comes around once every seven years."
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Jason Blum and Taylor Swift's (literal) movie mashup
Unfortunately, that's also the date Taylor Swift chose to release her movie version of her Eras Tour. And she announced it just eight weeks before The Exorcist was set to hit screens.
Blum tried to turn a challenge into an opportunity by tweeting, "#Exorswift," clearly a play on the "Barbenheimer" phenomenon of the summer that boosted ticket sales for both Barbie and Oppenheimer by getting audiences excited for a double feature. Sadly, lightning did not strike twice. "Three hours after I tweet that, the head of marketing calls and says, it’s not working, we gotta move the movie," said Blum.
The Exorcist: Believer was pushed up to October 6, and that would have been that, except it created a domino effect.
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Jason Blum isn't the only movie-maker in his family. His wife, Lauren Shukert Blum, is a successful screenwriter, and her project, Dumb Money, was scheduled to come out on, you guessed it, October 6.
"So not only did Taylor Swift destroy my Friday the 13th," said Blum jokingly, who noted that his daughter is a Swift fan, "she almost caused me to get divorced."
In the end, "It was a very tense 24 hours until my poor wife had to move her spectacular movie earlier," Blum recalled. Taylor! Look what you made the Blums (almost) do.
