'Blair Witch 3' Ready To Go?

Just another sequel to a franchise that shoul've been put to rest.  We know that the "found footage" genre is running rampant with Paranormal Acivity as the prime example and as so mnay other has asked, "What has kept Lionsgate from making Blair Witch 3?". The Blair Witch Project made $250 million worldwide at the boxoffice and its rushed sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, has flopped only making $50 million and it's a franchise that has been dormant for over 10 years.

According to Bloody-Disgusting who caught up with Eduardo Sanchez after the premiere of Lovely Molly, Sanchez has stated he wants to "bring back many of the original film's actors".

He goes on to say:

"It's completely up to Lionsgate, Dan and I are ready to do it. We've been toying around with a sequel idea that we really like. It's just a matter of getting our schedules in line and having Lionsgate sign off on the idea. We've been ready to do a 'Blair Witch' movie for a long time. We're as close as we've ever been to making it happen but it's still not a guaranteed thing."

Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, the other half to the original suprise hit, want to ignore the sequel even though they sort of liked the sequel. Crazy, I know:

"I actually liked the sequel but at the same time it exists in a world outside of the movie. So if we want to do a sequel to 'Blair Witch Project,' we have to stay in that world, which 'Book of Shadows' didn't stay in that world. 'Book of Shadows' created a different world. It's like if the sequel to 'Jaws' started with shots of people lined up to see 'Jaws' in the movie theater. For 'Book of Shadows' it worked in a certain way but to me my biggest gripe with Artisan was you shouldn't have called it 'Blair Witch 2.' It would've been fine to call it Blair Witch Chronicles. It wasn't really a sequel to our movie. so it would be a direct sequel to our film living in that mythology of Burkittsville, being possessed, haunted by something."

It's easy for a lot of people to gripe with the found footage style being "passé" as Bloody-Disgusting states, but Sanchez has the right idea: "Right now, the idea has no first person in it at all, but we'll see. There's always room for new ideas to come in."

On the return of some original castmembers, including Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael C. Williams: "The plan is to have them [back]. They're probably not going to be the main characters but they're definitely characters in the sequel."

On on the problematic 10 years difference in the actors appearance, Bloody-Disgusting proposed that it couldn't be a flashback in answering the ambiguous ending to the first film, Sanchez states: "No, it's not [a flashback film]."

Comments

[J.Bradley]

They created enough backstory and mythology to the Blair Witch legend that they could really still go anywhere in that history and universe without even calling it Blair Witch at all and still have some kind of different horror story. It wouldn't even need to be a "found footage" movie, though admittedly that IS the trend and the original Blair Witch is the modern era's grandmother of these type movies so there's a good deal of impetus to do it in that style. The main problem is time and there's been a lot of it to have passed since the phenomena of the first movie, but storywise there's still a lot there and if they indeed have a good idea, I'd really like to see what they pull off.