Tracy Oliver on ‘The Blackening’ Box Office and Why Making Microbudget Movies is ‘Empowering’
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SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from “The Blackening,” now streaming on Starz and available on VOD.
Tracy Oliver is best-known as the co-writer of “Girls Trip” and the creator of “Harlem” and “First Wives Club,” but she’s also quite proficient with numbers. And in terms of the success of her latest film, “The Blackening,” the numbers tell an important tale.
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“I don’t think people understand the math of it all,” Oliver says, settling into a plush beige armchair in the lobby of the 1 Hotel South Beach in Miami Beach on a sweltering day in June. “Even my family thought I made more on “Girls Trip” than I actually did.”
Despite the 2017 comedy becoming a massive box office hit — earning more than $140 million worldwide — Oliver didn’t have any backend on the film. “It was considered such a risk when we made it that they weren’t going to spend a lot of money on the writing,” she explains. “But I was just so happy to be there that I was like, ‘Oh my god, let’s do it!’”
Thus, with “The Blackening” being a microbudget production, she made more than “Girls Trip” paid on the horror-comedy’s opening day in theaters. “It’s that crazy?” she says of the financial windfall.
Oliver sat down with Variety at the tail end of a whirlwind media tour promoting “The Blackening’s” Juneteenth weekend debut. The theatrical release was specifically timed since the film follows a group of college friends who reunite for Juneteenth weekend and are hunted by a killer who asks them to determine who is the Blackest among them — lampooning the common horror movie trope that sees the Black character die first.
The day before the interview, Oliver, co-writer and star Dewayne Perkins (who’d originally conceived “The Blackening” as a short for his sketch comedy troupe 3Peat), director Tim Story and actors Jermaine Fowler, Melvin Gregg, X Mayo, Jay Pharoah, Antoinette Robertson and Sinqua Walls screened the movie as part of the American Black Film Festival lineup, and the crew was giddy with a mix of excitement and exhaustion. (Grace Byers, who also stars in Oliver’s “Harlem,” and Yvonne Orji didn’t make the trip.)
Then, the early box office returns came in: “The Blackening” grossed $2.5 million in its first day, opening in 1,775 theaters. Independently produced by Oliver and Story with MRC films financing, the horror-comedy carried a production budget of $3 million, with a final tally of $5 million after factoring in P&A.
The film made $17.7 million at the domestic box office, nearly six times what it cost to produce. Then, after 10 weeks in U.S. theaters, audiences found the movie on VOD, with superstars like LeBron James and Kid Cudi sharing rave reviews with millions more followers. In August, the film was released in U.K. and Ireland cinemas, bringing the worldwide box office total over $18 million. On Oct. 4, it began streaming on Starz.
“Many thanks to everyone who came out to support ‘The Blackening,’” Oliver tweeted on June 26. “Dewayne, Tim, cast & crew, and I did this movie for almost nothing in order to make it. We bet on ourselves. And somehow, this little movie went up against tentpoles with 50x our budget and held theatres. Grateful.”
“The Blackening” is a TIFF success story, premiering last year as part of the festival’s Midnight Madness lineup, where it was welcomed by a raucous audience and landed a rich distribution deal from Lionsgate. After that screening, “The Little Engine That Could” — as Oliver calls the film — began to pick up speed.
“You just never know what’s going to happen when you’re making [a movie] at that price point,” Oliver says. “We were like, ‘Well, maybe it’ll go to a streamer.’ Then we went and played at TIFF. It was such a great crowdpleaser that Lionsgate was like, ‘You know what, we have a theatrical play here and then streaming.’ So, the fact that it made [$2.5 million] in a day, that’s amazing. I’m just really, really happy. I didn’t expect it.”
Why not? Because the harbingers of Hollywood’s conventional wisdom told her not to.
“Everybody acts like you need all these elements to be theatrical, and if it has a mostly Black cast, everyone’s always scared,” she explains. “Even with ‘Girls Trip,’ it was treated like, ‘Alright we’ll see.’ It was never, ‘This is going to be a hit.’ In retrospect, people say, ‘Well, of course,’ but it was never like that when we were making it. It is always, ‘Fingers crossed it works, so that we get to make another one of these.’ But then when it hit, it was like, ‘Oh, wow!’”
When that’s the attitude around a movie with established stars like Queen Latifah, Regina Hall and Jada Pinkett Smith (plus a breakout turn from Tiffany Haddish) and an annual cultural experience like Essence Fest behind it, it was hard to predict “The Blackening’s” future.
“Especially after the pandemic, theatrical has become this impossible thing,” Oliver notes. But her gut told her something different. “All I know is that I think it’s funny and every screening I’ve been to the movie has played extremely well. But that’s all you have. I can’t be like, ‘No, you guys are all wrong.’”
Hollywood decision-makers aren’t the only naysayers, though. Oliver also wrestles with the “internet trolls” who dismiss the movie simply because it focuses on Blackness. “The Blackening” follows a group of college friends who reunite to celebrate Juneteenth at a cabin in the woods, only to be hunted by a killer who forces them to determine who is the Blackest among them.
“It wasn’t made in that spirit. It celebrates Black people, but it’s not exclusionary,” she says bristling at the negative comments, which she’s been advised not to read but can’t help herself. “I hate how anytime there’s Black content, there’s this idea that it’s racist, automatically. Why are we doing that? I want everyone to show up — Black people, Asian people, Latinos, everyone.”
In fact, Oliver and Perkins intentionally avoided using racism as the villain’s motive. “That would have been the easiest, most obvious thing to do — that the white person just hates Black people and that’s the movie,” she explains. “[We decided to] let the villain play into the theme — who’s Black and who’s not — versus the easier way. I didn’t want to do something that was going to vilify anybody.”
Both Oliver and Perkins related to that theme intimately; she was bullied for not being “Black enough” because she was a nerd who liked to read, while he hid his sexuality and participated in “non-masculine” hobbies like ballet. They channeled those tough memories into Clifton (Fowler), a character who’s had a hard time fitting in with the crew. “He is the prototype for the kind of Black person that has a hard time because he’s very nerdy,” Oliver says. “And we play into that.”
Early in the film, Clifton tries to get in on a game of spades, but he’s quickly dismissed because he doesn’t know how to play, and there’s no time to each him. Oliver found that scene to be particularly triggering. “It reminded me of middle school all over again,” she admits. While some people (like this reporter) still don’t know how to play, she felt forced to learn. “I had to learn all these things because your Blackness was measured on such silly metrics, like playing spades.”
Of course, being bullied over not knowing how to play spades is not a valid reason to mastermind a murder plot, but it was perfect fodder for parody.
“At the age he would have been when people made fun of him, that would’ve been the worst thing in the world to not be able to dance and all the tropes of what’s deemed Black enough,” Oliver explains. “In a lot of ways, we understood where Clifton was coming from, but he’s an example of when it’s taken too far. It can spiral if you take that stuff to heart.”
“The Blackening” tackles other well-worn horror movie tropes and shakes its head right along with the audience. Case in point, when one character says he’s going to find the fuse box when the power goes out, the rest of the group rises to go along with him. They know splitting up is dumb.
“We tried to make decisions throughout that acknowledge some of the things that we eye-roll in horror movies,” Oliver says. “But they all split up because it’s a movie, and they have to do dumb stuff for it to last an hour and a half. Now I get why horror writers make these choices. There’s no movie!”
Then there’s the industry jokes: “The Blackening” opens with a nod to “Scream 2,” where Jada Pinkett Smith and Omar Epps die in the opening scene; “The Blackening’s” version of that duo are “Insecure” star Yvonne Orji and “Saturday Night Live” alum Jay Pharoah, who look at each other knowingly as they (and the audience) come to the realization that they are the two most well-known actors in the cast, and therefore fated to meet their demise.
“It was the realest thing in the movie because we couldn’t afford them. We could barely afford the cast that we have,” Oliver says, noting that all the actors made SAG scale for the 20-day shoot. “We had to get to a cast who wanted to work with me and Tim, and to be in a horror movie. At that price point, it’s not about money. It’s about making something really fun and cool, and maybe they wouldn’t get the opportunity [otherwise].”
The actors’ gamble paid off. “Half of the cast have never had a movie play in theaters, so they’re like, “Oh my God, this little movie that I made no money when I was doing, is now in theaters. Thank you,” Oliver says, beaming with pride.
The hope is that successes like “The Blackening” will create more opportunity for Black creatives in a variety of genres, continuing a mission she set forth at the beginning of her career producing, writing and co-starring in “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl” with Issa Rae. Back then, Oliver and Rae were told that their look wasn’t “commercial” enough, nor was their writing.
“I hate how quickly people tell you that there’s no audience for something,” Oliver recalls. “I was like, ‘Fuck that. We’re going to go make this and figure it out.’ We weren’t making money initially, but eventually it paid off. And guess what? We turned ourselves into commodities by not allowing them to tell us who we were and what we were capable of.”
A decade ago, Oliver, Rae, and contemporaries like Donald Glover, Lena Waithe and Justin Simien were the upstarts – a new class of Black Hollywood creatives. Now they’re the vanguards.
“When I finished film school around 2011, there was nothing. This was pre- ‘Atlanta,’ ‘Black-ish’ and ‘Scandal.’ It was just so lily white and everyone kept telling us, ‘You have to learn how to fit into the white space; you can’t create,’” Oliver recalls. “Luckily — I don’t know if there was something in the atmosphere or something in the water where we’re all from — but we were all like, ‘F that.’”
That tenacity has made them some of the most in-demand and acclaimed creators working in the business. But, making “The Blackening” has further shifted Oliver’s perspective on the industry and how she moves within it.
“It’s been the most inspiring thing I’ve done in my career thus far,” Oliver says. “When you work in the studio system, you’re so powerless. Because of past success, I have the ability to sell a lot, but I don’t write things to sell. I want to make stuff. I’ve always been a producer at heart, so it doesn’t feel good to get a check and then the world never sees it.”
For example, after “Girls Trip” hit big, Oliver began developing a reboot of “Clueless” in 2018. It’s been five years and she can’t say for certain whether that movie will happen or if it’s dead. Same goes for “Girls Trip 2” — despite its blockbuster success, it was four years before a script got commissioned. Oliver had just gotten started when the writers strike put those plans on hold. (The same is true for “Harlem,” which ended its second season on Prime Video on a cliffhanger with no word about a season 3 renewal.) So, she’s told her reps that she wants her next movie to be a micro-budget film.
“I hate development. I hate rewrites — I know that they have to happen, but I like to rewrite with a purpose,” she explains. “It feels demoralizing when you rewrite and they’re like, ‘Eh, we’re not gonna make it.’ Then you’ve spent a year, sometimes more, working on something that’ll never see the light of day.”
It was a totally different story with “The Blackening,” where filmmakers began pre-production three weeks after the screenplay was finished. That pendulum swing wasn’t just exciting, Oliver describes the experience as “empowering.”
“I keep telling the cast and other writers, there’s money out there,” Oliver concludes. “$3 million is a lot easier to come by than $20-50 million. There’s a lot of people that can piece together $3 million. We don’t have to necessarily wait for a studio to say ‘Yes’ anymore. For a Black person, that’s inspiring.”
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