Book Of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 Wasn't The Box Office Flop You Think It Was

(Welcome to Tales from the Box Office, our column that examines box office miracles, disasters, and everything in between, as well as what we can learn from them.)

"I should've realised the deception involved in bringing me in was a warning sign that things might go awry." Those are the words of director Joe Berlinger, reflecting to Yahoo in 2020 regarding his much-maligned sequel, "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2." At the time, Berlinger thought he was heading to the offices of Artisan Entertainment to pitch a documentary he was trying to get off the ground.

Instead, the executives revealed they wanted him to direct a sequel to "The Blair Witch Project," which made nearly $250 million at the global box office against a tiny $60,000 budget, becoming an unexpected sensation in 1999. There was deception, but it also represented an opportunity for Berlinger to get into the world of narrative features, piggybacking off of one of the most financially successful films in cinema history.

The result? A critically panned sequel that couldn't come close to competing with its game-changing found footage predecessor financially. All the same, it was still a success for the studio, at least in terms of dollars and cents. Despite its lousy reputation, the movie was by no means a flop.

In this week's Tales from the Box Office, we're looking back at "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2" in honor of its 25th anniversary. We'll go over the unusual process that led to its creation, the messy production, what happened when it hit theaters, what transpired in the aftermath of its release, and what we can learn from it all these years later. Let's dig in, shall we?

The film is a meta take on the franchise, centering on a group of college students who take a "Blair Witch Hunt" tour, showcasing locations from the original film. After camping out for the evening, they realize they didn't sleep and have no memory of the previous night. After returning to town, strange things begin to occur.

Once "The Blair Witch Project" became a massive hit and a cultural phenomenon, Artisan rushed development of a sequel, determined to capitalize on the hype. Original directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez were not involved. "We really had no involvement with it and would rather have had Artisan wait until all the buzz around Blair died down," Myrick said to Movie Hole some years later.

The duo wasn't opposed to a sequel, but they weren't in as much of a rush. So, Artisan developed a sequel without them, albeit in an unusual fashion. As The Guardian reported in late '99, the studio hired four different screenwriters, Jon Bokenkamp, Neal Marshall Stevens, Robert Parigi, and another unidentified writer, to come up with an idea for a sequel. Berlinger didn't spark to any of them and had his own ideas about what a sequel could be.

"I remember being aggravated by the film," Berlinger said of "The Blair Witch Project" in that same 2020 Yahoo interview. "I thought it worked and the filmmakers did a great job — but what I objected to was two things: why do people equate bad camera work, something real documentarians don't do, with reality? And more importantly, the marketing hoax, where people were fooled into believing they were watching a real snuff film."

Many audiences thought "The Blair Witch Project" was real, despite reports confirming that it was a work of fiction. That inspired Berlinger's take, which Artisan bought into. "I was fascinated that some people walked out of the theatre and, despite seeing all the press coverage that this was a hoax, still went down to the woods to see if it was real," Berlinger said in that Yahoo piece.

He had to assemble the script along with screenwriter Dick Beebe ("House on Haunted Hill") in mere weeks as "Blair Witch 2" was beginning production in January 2000, no matter what, to hit an October release. The studio largely let Berlinger do his thing — at least at first. Speaking with Polygon in 2023, Berlinger explained:

"I literally had no studio supervision, except they kept telling me, looking at the dailies, 'Love it, love it, keep going!' They were taking Artisan public in this IPO craze based on the performance of Blair Witch. Those guys were just too busy counting their money before it came in."

Berlinger had a cut and a vision he liked, but the studio stepped in during the post-production process, completely altering those plans. Artisan demanded amped up violence, a nu metal soundtrack, and further changes. Berlinger revealed how it went down in that Yahoo interview.

"I remember arguing with the President of the company who was insisting on these changes. I said the legacy of The Blair Witch Project is that all the violence was off-screen and it's very Hitchcock-ian to see nothing. They wrote me an email back saying something to the effect of 'viewers of this movie want a traditional horror and they wouldn't even know who [Alfred] Hitchcock was'. They had zero respect for the viewer."

On the plus side, Artisan got the movie made in time. That's where the perceived positives largely end, though. The sequel was eviscerated by critics, with the marketing attempting to be hip and with the times, rather than dangerous and transgressive like the original. Critics savaged the movie. "Creating a movie that virtually everyone can hate is no small accomplishment. But filmmaker Joe Berlinger may just have pulled it off," wrote Jay Boyar in his review for the Orlando Sentinel.

All the same, "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2" met its release date, just 15 months after the original's rollout. The sequel hit theaters on the weekend of October 7, 2000, getting in on the Halloween season. It opened to $13.2 million against a $15 million budget, good enough for number two on the charts behind "Meet the Parents" ($15 million), which was in the midst of its $330 million run.

The movie slid down the charts rapidly, falling out of the top ten entirely once Adam Sandler's devil comedy "Little Nicky" arrived in early November, with "Charlie's Angels" also doing big business. Berlinger's much-meddled-with sequel was a major disappointment from just about every angle.

"Blair Witch 2" finished its run with $26.4 million domestically to go with $21.3 million internationally for a grand total of $47.7 million worldwide. Or less than one-fifth of what the original made on a tiny fraction of the budget.

Another way to look at it? "Book of Shadows" made more than three times its reported production budget at a time when home video and other secondary revenue streams were far more lucrative. Those are terms any studio would be happy with. Would they have liked a better-received movie that might have had more library value? Surely, but any movie that makes three times its budget isn't a flop. A disappointment relative to lofty expectations? Absolutely, but not a flop.

It's also worth pointing out that the soundtrack, which featured P.O.D. and System of a Down, as opposed to Frank Sinatra as Berlinger had envisioned, was a big success. He estimated in the Polygon piece that Artisan made around $25 million from a DVD/CD bundle tied to "Blair Witch 2" alone.

In any event, the response killed the franchise for years. The original team discussed "Blair Witch 3" as far back as at least 2009, but their version never got off the ground. Instead, in 2016, Lionsgate began marketing a movie called "The Woods," which turned out to be a surprise "Blair Witch" sequel directed by Adam Wingard.

Critics were mixed on the film, but against a mere $5 million budget, it pulled in just shy of $40 million worldwide. Again, not the success Lionsgate had hoped for, but a success nevertheless. While there were discussions of a possible "Blair Witch" TV show, it never came to pass. That's most likely because the movie failed, once again, to live up to lofty expectations it could never possibly meet.

Despite its lousy reception, time eventually caught up to "Blair Witch 2." More recent re-evaluations of the film have been far more kind, with many modern critics praising the film's meta-narrative. Wes Craven's "Scream" helped save the slasher genre by going meta in 1996. Unfortunately, Berlinger's film couldn't capture that same wave at the time, but people have slowly caught up with it.

Reflecting on "Book of Shadows" for /Film in 2018, Britt Hayes hailed it as "one of the most delightful and rewarding sequels in horror history," calling it "a self-aware piece of satire that targets an audience that just couldn't leave well enough alone." In his ranking of the films for /Film in 2024, Chris Evangelista placed Berlinger's sequel in the number two spot ahead of Wingard's "Blair Witch." A quick perusal of the internet will showcase dozens of articles and videos offering a reappraisal of the film.

It's hard not to wonder what might have been if Berlinger's original vision had been embraced by Artisan, which ended up merging with Lionsgate in 2003. "There were a lot of really smart ideas that were ahead of their time, but the studio at the 12th hour got scared. I think that's what people are seeing," Berlinger mused in that Polygon piece. 

Alas, Hollywood meddling with a creative vision is a tale as old as time. All of that meddling didn't seem to help much. The lesson, from the creative lens here, is that studios need to sometimes be okay with committing to creative visions. Getting cold feet and watering down the product rarely ends well. See Ridley Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven" or Scott Derrickson's "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

But the bigger thing that stands out like a sore thumb, in this case, is the fact that this movie is so frequently classified as a bomb or a flop. In the realm of the box office, those terms should only ever be used to classify a movie that lost a large sum of money. Think Eddie Murphy's "The Adventures of Pluto Nash" or 2015's "Fantastic Four." Again, "Blair Witch 2" can undoubtedly be classified as a disappointment, but it made money. Flop is an unearned label.

As the box office remains on uncertain ground right now, the terms "flop" or "bomb" get thrown around very frequently. In reality, these words are used far too frivolously, which helps distort their meaning. "The Blair Witch Project" was one of the most unexpected, lightning-in-a-bottle success stories in cinema history. Expecting that any sequel could come close to matching that high was a fool's errand.

But the fact that yet another new "Blair Witch" movie is in the works at Blumhouse speaks volumes. This franchise still makes money. It has always made money. Yes, even "Book of Shadows."