Blair Butler: Last News

Sony’s Screen Gems is releasing the feature take of its Sony Playstation game Until Dawn on April 25, 2025.

EXCLUSIVE: Sony’s Screen Gems has acquired rights to Ushers, an unpublished short story written by Joe Hill. Under his first look deal with the studio, Gary Dauberman and his team at Coin Operated will develop and produce with Zak Olkewicz set to write the script. Coin Operated’s President, Mia Maniscalco, will also be a producer.

Caroline Brew editor David F. Sandberg, known for “Annabelle: Creation,” “Shazam!” and “Lights Out,” will direct the film adaptation of the PlayStation horror video game “Until Dawn” by Screen Gems and PlayStation Productions. “It: Chapter Two” and “The Nun” screenwriter Gary Dauberman is doing the most recent pass on a script from “The Invitation” writer Blair Butler.

Joe Leydon Film Critic Despite some ambitious efforts by director Jessica M. Thompson and screenwriter Blair Butler to revitalize hoary horror movie tropes with allegorical commentary on race, class and male privilege, “The Invitation” is too wearyingly hackneyed for too much of its running time, and too often laugh-out-loud funny as its plot relies on the age-old convention of a smart yet naive heroine who makes one bad decision after another. It would not be at all surprising if, at some screenings, exasperated members of the audience shout rude things at the screen each time the endangered protagonist fails to act in her own self-interest. Evelyn (Nathalie Emmanuel of “Game of Thrones”) is a free-spirited twentysomething New Yorker who insists that everyone, even total strangers, call her Evie — and she insists quite frequently, just so we don’t miss the fact that she is indeed a free spirit — and scrapes by as wait staff at catered affairs while trying to fulfill her artistic ambitions creating ceramics. When she helps herself to a swag bag at a swanky affair for Find Yourself (evidently an upscale version of Ancestry.com), she finds a DNA test among the goodies and opts to investigate her family tree. This, of course, is the first of many mistakes.

EXCLUSIVE: Sony is in development on sci-fi movie Omega, which Mortal Kombat filmmaker Simon McQuoid is attached to direct.