05/15/2026
The original Blair Witch Project was shot for somewhere between $35,000 and $60,000. It grossed roughly $249 million worldwide, one of the highest returns on investment in film history. The cast and core creators signed their deals before SAG-AFTRA representation and saw almost none of it on the back end.
The 2000 sequel Book of Shadows was studio-driven, non-found-footage, and a flop. None of the original team was involved. The 2016 sequel, directed by Adam Wingard and written by Simon Barrett, sidelined them again.
When Lionsgate and Blumhouse announced another Blair Witch project at CinemaCon in April 2024, the three original stars, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams, joined directors Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick, and Gregg Hale, along with producers Robin Cowie and Michael Monello, on a public open letter. They asked for retroactive and ongoing residuals at SAG-AFTRA levels, real consultation on the franchise going forward, and a $60,000 annual grant in the film's name to support a first-time genre filmmaker. Leonard posted it publicly and called it 25 years of disrespect.
On April 30, 2026, The Hollywood Reporter confirmed that Leonard, Williams, Sánchez, Myrick, and Hale are all attached as executive producers on the new film at Lionsgate, Blumhouse, and Atomic Monster. Dylan Clark is directing from a script by Chris Thomas Devlin, with James Wan, Jason Blum, and Roy Lee among the producers. Whether the financial terms of the open letter were met has not been publicly disclosed.
Heather Donahue is not on the EP list, and her absence is by choice. She retired from acting in 2008, legally changed her name to Rei Hance in 2020, and moved to Maine, where she now serves in local government. She co-signed the 2024 letter. She has shown no interest in returning to film.
Joshua Leonard has spent the last two decades working in independent film as an actor, director, and producer, with credits including Higher Ground, The Motel Life, and Unsane. Michael C. Williams largely stepped away from acting and spent years working as a guidance counselor and theater coach before returning to horror in recent projects like Satanic Hispanics and Ghost Game.
The actors used their real first names in the 1999 film. The directors gave them character outlines and sent them into the Maryland woods for eight days, leaving sticks, stones, and sounds outside their tents at night to keep the fear real. The marketing campaign that followed, fake police reports, "recovered" footage, a missing-persons site, built the template every viral horror release has used since.
