If the notion of another Blair Witch movie exhausts you, try to imagine mustering up the energy and excitement for returning to the project that put you on the map creatively. After the film came out in 1999, it represented a grand shift in thinking, but it didn’t really lead to success for co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Both have languished in the tepid world of indie horror filmmaking, which may be why they’re so eager to get back to the woods.
However, Sanchez is coming off the heels of a critically praised Lovely Molly – which played at Toronto. Still he’s championing a return to Blair Witch and waiting on Lionsgate to stop dragging their feet. “It’s completely up to Lionsgate,” Sanchez told Bloody Disgusting. “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.”
The silver lining is that Sanchez and Myrick want to move away completely from the awful, no good, very bad sequel Book of Shadows. Plus, there is no plan to include first-person filmmaking in the new project. But at the root of it all, this would still be a years-later sequel to a property that probably didn’t require a follow-up in the first place. Do we, as an audience, really need to know more about that world?
Of course, the main point here is that it still isn’t happening. Whatever their reasons are, Lionsgate has decided not to pursue it, and it’s unclear what exactly might change their collective minds.