Five days ago River was a Shudder movie. It is not anymore.
Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Atomic Monster are closing a deal to acquire Josh Giuliano’s slasher out of the Toronto International Film Festival for north of $10 million, according to IndieWire, Variety and TheWrap. The film goes to Universal from Independent Film Company and Shudder, who backed it and were set to release it.
That is a large number for a first feature, and it is a very large number for a movie about four people and a boat.
What Universal Just Bought
Three estranged siblings go out to a remote stretch of water to scatter their father’s ashes. The boat dies. There is no cell service. Something comes out of the trees. Jane Levy and Jessica Rothe play the sisters, Max Mattern is the younger brother, and Dane DiLiegro — the creature performer inside Prey‘s Feral Predator — is the thing doing the stalking.
It premiered in Midnight Madness on September 10, which is the section Hollywood now combs for the next Obsession or Backrooms. “One of the most suspenseful slashers I have seen in years,” programmer Peter Kuplowsky said of it. We wrote about that premiere the following morning.
Two Final Girls Is the Whole Pitch
Casting Levy and Rothe opposite each other is the kind of idea that sells a movie in a room. Levy survived Evil Dead in 2013, the remake nobody wanted that turned out to be one of the meanest studio horror films of the decade. Rothe spent two Happy Death Day movies dying on a loop and getting funnier about it, and a third one has a story but no green light. Putting them in the same boat means an audience spends the runtime unable to work out which one the movie intends to keep.
The producing bench is genre-literate too. Nick Antosca produced, which is a name worth noticing — he built Channel Zero out of creepypasta and wrote for Hannibal, and he does not usually attach himself to straightforward things. Alex Hedlund and Steven Schneider produced alongside him, with Roy Lee and Jason Blum among the executive producers.
Why Giuliano Had Leverage
Three days after the premiere, before this deal surfaced, Giuliano had already set his second film Occupant at Blumhouse Atomic Monster with Focus Features distributing worldwide. So Blumhouse signed the director first and is now buying the movie that made them want him. That is an unusually tidy week for someone who had never released a feature.
No release date has been announced, and the deal was still described as closing rather than closed when the trades reported it. What the change most likely means in practice is theaters — a wide Universal slasher release instead of a limited run followed by streaming.
