EXCLUSIVE: A highly competitive bidding war ended with New Line Cinema paying high-six figures in an outright buy for Victor Sweetser’s hot horror short story, Occupant. Barbarian’s Zach Cregger, Vertigo’s Roy Lee and Ground Control’s Scott Glassgold are on board to produce along with John Pelloquin. Deadline revealed the auction as it was heating up today. It is a testament to the power of genre IP.
With the story only on the market for less than 24 hours, a tremendous amount of interest was generated around town for what is being described as a reinvention of the haunted house movie. The story attracted all sorts of suitors and quickly the team of Lee and Cregger (Barbarian) coalesced with Glassgold, who originated the project with the author. Cregger and Lee were just the subject of a heated auction for Weapons, which Cregger has written and will direct. He’s also producing Companion for New Line, and both those film are greenlighted.
New Line has been a pre-eminent genre hitmaker, with It grossing $705M worldwide in 2017 (Vertigo’s Lee produced), and the top horror franchise in history, The Conjuring universe, which collectively has grossed more than $2 billion.
Glassgold’s Ground Control has proved to be a go-to shop for generating horror in the short-story space.
Occupant marks the company’s sixth recent short story sale including My Wife & I Bought a Range and We Used to Live Here to Netflix, Caretaker to Universal, I Think My Mother-In-Law Is Trying to Kill Me to Sony 3000 and Wilderness Reform to Paramount. All of these deals were done in partnership with Verve Talent Agency.
Glassgold just finished production on the upcoming Spenser Cohen & Anna Halberg movie, Horrorscope, for Sony’s Screen Gems.
Verve, which represented the project and its elements, will be auctioning the book rights to Occupant as well.
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