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Episode 650: The Business Genius Behind Get Out

Jason Blum, Blumhouse Productions
Steve Henn / NPR
Jason Blum, Blumhouse Productions

This episode first ran in 2015.

Get Out is a comic film. Get Out is a horror movie. Get Out is serious commentary. It's hard to say what exactly Get Out is, but it is definitely a blockbuster. Which is surprising, because it was made by a company which totally rejects the blockbuster model: Blumhouse Productions.

Blumhouse, run by Jason Blum, makes movies on tiny budgets. They make a lot of movies, and many of them sneak straight to video, if you know what we mean. But somehow, they keep making hits. And it's happening more often. Get Out, for example, cost about $4.5 million to make, which is extremely cheap for Hollywood. Since it opened in February, it has grossed nearly $150 million.

In this episode, Stacey Vanek Smith and Steve Henn go to Blumhouse and found out how they work, following the director of Fast and Furious as he learns to make big movies on small dollars.

Music: "The Night Is Young" and "Go To Go Go." Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

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Note: We originally titled this re-run "The Genius Behind Get Out." We've changed it to "The Business Genius Behind Get Out." We didn't mean to take anything away from the director.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Steve Henn is NPR's technology correspondent based in Menlo Park, California, who is currently on assignment with Planet Money. An award winning journalist, he now covers the intersection of technology and modern life - exploring how digital innovations are changing the way we interact with people we love, the institutions we depend on and the world around us. In 2012 he came frighteningly close to crashing one of the first Tesla sedans ever made. He has taken a ride in a self-driving car, and flown a drone around Stanford's campus with a legal expert on privacy and robotics.
Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.
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