The Guys Behind Companion Keep Churning Out Hits — and Pissing Off Hollywood
Expectations for the Companion script were low. Written by Drew Hancock, a journeyman staffer on canceled shows like Suburgatory and My Dead Ex who had been doing uncredited rewrites for Netflix YA movies and series pilots that never got made, the screenplay was delivered to the Burbank-based production company BoulderLight Pictures on spec — that is, unsolicited and without any assumption of commitment by either a studio or producer. The kind of thing that could wind up at the bottom of a development slush pile or remain unread forever.
Hancock himself had near-zero expectations that his genre-mishmash screenplay — adorkable, satirical, and sci-fi slasher-thriller begin to hint at Companion’s odd gestalt — would ever become a movie. He instead hoped to use it as a calling card to land other work. “I was at a place in my career where I was really frustrated and not getting the jobs I wanted,” Hancock recalls. “Companion came out of that frustration. It was this writing sample to be like, If this gets made, great. If it doesn’t, I hope, at the very least, it represents the kind of movies I want to make.”
Reaching theaters last Friday with a dazzling 94 percent “fresh”-ness rating on the Tomatometer, the R-rated revenge-of-the-sexbot romp defied long moviemaking odds to pass through the green-light process a mere 24 hours after hitting BoulderLight’s desk. Now rolling out on Imax with distribution from Warner Bros., the film took in $9.5 million over its domestic landfall this past weekend and an additional $5.5 million overseas, essentially recouping its production budget and then some in one fell swoop. Companion arrives as Hancock’s feature-length directorial debut, though he never dreamed he would direct the movie either. It comes with a sterling pedigree, co-produced by Roy Lee (the box-office rainmaker behind the It, Godzilla, and LEGO Movie franchises) and Zach Cregger, the writer-director of 2022’s out-of-nowhere horror hit Barbarian who was originally set to direct Companion. But precisely none of these pieces would have fallen into place without BoulderLight Pictures, a kind of burgeoning Blumhouse 2.0 — insofar as BoulderLight similarly produces genre films with untested talent on tiny budgets yielding maximal returns — co-founded and headed by hard-charging New York–born whiz kids JD Lifshitz, 32, and Raphael Margules, 33.
Producers of microbudget horror since they were barely out of their teens, Lifshitz and Margules famously championed Barbarian when every studio and production shingle in Hollywood had passed on the plot-twist-y, Tarantino-tinged horror-thriller; they ultimately engineered its release through Disney. And when the $4.5 million independently financed feature went on to shock the industry by delivering a critical triumph and grossing a robust $45.3 million worldwide, BoulderLight saw its profile skyrocket along with Cregger’s. Almost overnight, he metamorphosed from sketch-comedy-troupe refugee into a visionary final-cut director now mentioned in the same breath as Jordan Peele and Ari Aster. In 2023, BoulderLight signed a multiyear first-look deal with the Warner Bros. subsidiary New Line Cinema. “Finding that movie wasn’t an accident,” says Richard Brener, New Line’s president and chief creative officer. “With their combination of a gut–eye level for talent and knowledge of the business, it became pretty clear that they would be able to find more movies that would be fresh but also be aware of what works, what worked in the past, and what would work in the future.”
Speaking via video link from the Sundance Film Festival, where they were surveying the indie landscape and scoping out potential acquisitions, Margules and Lifshitz say they are driven by a simple mandate: make entertaining movies that would have thrilled their 12-year-old movie-crazy selves — for a “responsible price.” With that in mind, backing new filmmakers with wild projects and bucking the kind of risk aversion that seems to govern modern Hollywood comes down to intuition — and maybe pissing off a few industry bigwigs along the way. “We like to say we don’t chase heat; we create it,” Margules says. “It’s us believing in the process and believing in our gut.” Lifshitz adds, “We want to make cool stuff that everyone else is trying to rip off. Not chasing trends but making trends — for us, that’s very instinctual. I feel like we are at war continually with homogenization and mediocrity. That’s what’s killing the movie business.”
BoulderLight is on a tear lately with Companion hitting screens close on the heels of October’s fact-based serial-killer drama Woman of the Hour, which Lifshitz and Margules co-produced for Netflix, offering star Anna Kendrick her directorial debut. At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the producers’ Tim Robinson–Paul Rudd two-hander comedy, Friendship, was acquired for distribution by A24 (for “mid-seven figures” with plans to release it this year), one more feature-directing first by TV veteran Andrew DeYoung. And Cregger’s Boulderlight follow-up Weapons (scheduled to hit theaters next January) — another sly, horror-genre-bending exercise with multiple, interrelated story lines à la Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia — has posted sky-high scores with test audiences, signaling a potential blockbuster for Warner Bros.
What all those films have in common is a “negative pickup” structure modeled (in aggregate) on Blumhouse, which similarly empowers sub-brand-name directors with wide creative latitude and pumps out horror on a shoestring budget, selling finished cinematic product to studios for a fixed sum and splitting net profits. Perhaps not coincidentally, Hollywood horror doyen Jason Blum himself gave the BoulderLight co-chieftains his personal seal of approval in 2019. “I get asked a lot who will be the next Blumhouse,” Blum posted on the platform then known as Twitter, accompanied by a photo of himself with Margules and Lifshitz. “Who is a good example of someone on the path to success in Hollywood today? The answer to both are the 2 guys pictures [sic] below.”
Having put out a staggering 24 movies over the past dozen years, the BoulderLight executives exude a relentless energy, finishing one another’s sentences and frequently referencing a vast knowledge not only of cinema but the economic arcana surrounding classic films. Owing to some combination of relative youth and a lengthening track record of success, Lifshitz and Margules view themselves as agents of change — of fiscal responsibility married to creative big swings in a stagnating Hollywood. “We don’t view ourselves as independent producers,” Margules explains. “We want to be a 21st-century entertainment studio, something between a Blumhouse and a Castle Rock.” (Castle Rock Entertainment, of course, pumped out as many as ten films a year during its mid-’90s heyday.)
That unflagging drive, however, can be both an asset and a liability. According to a source who worked with BoulderLight, Lifshitz and Margules were “fired” from Woman of the Hour after heated run-ins with Stuart Ford, the chief executive of its financier, AGC Studios. While retaining a producing fee and credit, the duo were barred from the set and prevented from giving input during postproduction. “They’re super-aggressive guys,” says this source. “But they’re pissing off a lot of people. It’s almost like they got too much success quickly and are dictating things to people above them that are rubbing them really the wrong way.” (Kendrick and AGC did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Given the opportunity to respond to the allegations, which had not been previously reported, in a follow-up interview, Margules and Lifshitz declined to comment. Their publicist, Heidi Lopata, said the producers “parted ways due to creative differences.”)
New Line’s Brener puts Margules’s and Lifshitz’s hard-charging tendencies within the perspective of old-school Hollywood — a tradition of industry players who operated on instinct rather than data, for the love of the moviemaking game rather than to cash a check. “Look, they are definitely aggressive and bold and they trust their gut above everything else,” Brener says. “They are, in many ways, like a throwback [style of] producer in this day and age, where they don’t take ‘no’ for an answer. They’ll push that giant boulder up the hill — no pun intended.”
To hear him tell it, the BoulderLight guys’ intensity level remains high whether they are interacting with the co-chair–CEOs of the Warner Bros. motion-picture group, Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, or the much-reviled, slash-and-burn CEO of the studio’s parent corporation, Warner Bros. Discovery. “You just can’t stress enough they’re like a whirlwind,” says Brener. “As they’ve interacted with marketing and distribution, Mike and Pam, even David Zaslav, they’ve stayed true to who they are in whatever room that is. That is like owning the mantle of what a producer used to mean and maybe still does — but in a way that’s singular and unique.”
Companion provides a convenient primer for the way BoulderLight works. Around 2014, BoulderLight had explored developing another project with Hancock that ultimately went nowhere. This was just a year shy of Lifshitz’s and Margules’s first producorial credit, the $50,000-budgeted body-horror thriller Contracted. In the summer of 2022, Hancock fine-tuned his script — which follows a demure sexual-companion robot that loves her boyfriend-owner too much and goes homicidally rogue at an idyllic lakeside estate upon awakening to her artificial intelligence — just as Barbarian was nearing its theatrical rollout. With no clue that BoulderLight was newly on the hunt for a follow-up film for Cregger to direct, Hancock sent the Companion script to his old acquaintance Lifshitz, who read it overnight and called the next day to make a deal. “It usually takes execs weeks and weeks to read a script, if you’re lucky,” Hancock recalls, still sounding thunderstruck at the memory. “And then 24 hours after that, Roy Lee at Vertigo Entertainment had attached himself to it. And then a week after that, they sent it to Zach, and Zach loved it. I had a whole producing team behind me within a week of finishing. And that never happens!”
That summer, Cregger and Hancock kicked off the development process together in earnest. But after Barbarian’s ecstatic screening at Los Angeles’s Beyond Fest in August 2022, the industry began looking at Cregger as a potent new filmmaking voice. The BoulderLight execs resolved to have him plow his energy into the ambitious follow-up script that would turn into Weapons. And Cregger proposed installing Hancock at the helm of Companion despite the writer’s total absence of feature-directing bona fides. “It was pretty clear, early on, that singular voice extended beyond the page in terms of what he wanted this to be,” Lifshitz says.
All of which came as news to Hancock. “I remember getting the phone call and being so shocked by it,” he says. “There was no version of this movie where I was going to direct it. Without me knowing, Zach went to BoulderLight and Vertigo and got them to sign off on me.”
I ask Lifshitz and Margules if their run of high-profile projects has made getting the studio go-ahead for new movies any easier. Lifshitz acknowledges that preselling titles based on BoulderLight’s track record of success has become a more streamlined process, then launches into a conversational flight of fancy about the fiscal difficulties directors such as Peele, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola faced while respectively trying to get the green light for Get Out, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and the Godfather movies. “When you are making things that are cutting edge, when you’re making things you hope will inspire culture instead of aping culture” — he says before Margules cuts in to finish the thought — “you just give executives a reason to say ‘no.’”
“You’d think it’d be logical at this point for it to be a little bit easier,” Margules says. “But if it was logical, it wouldn’t be the movie business.”
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