Vancouver film producer Chris Ferguson and his studio Oddfellows have signed a first-look deal with the Warner Bros. Picture Group.
Founded in 2013, Ferguson’s Oddfellows was behind the horror hits Longlegs and The Monkey. Ferguson was also part of the producing team behind the hugely successful Vancouver-shot film Backrooms.
Since its May 29 release, Backrooms, which was made for $10 million, has brought in a whopping $375 million in box office receipts making it A24’s highest-grossing film.
As part of the new three-year first look (first refusal) deal, Ferguson will bring projects to Warner Bros., and Warner Bros. will bring him projects from across its various titles, including Warner Bros. Pictures and New Line Cinema.
“It’s exciting. It’s it’s sort of a game-changing size of a deal for a company like ours,” said Ferguson, who last year received the Mayor’s Achievement Award for his work with the Overdose Prevention Society in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. “It lets all of our staff have job security and the comfort to be able to go take risks and and be bold in the movies we want to make and a pathway to make movies at the highest level.”
Warner Bros. Pictures Group’s Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy said in a joint statement that Ferguson and the Oddfellows team “have built a filmmaker-first creative engine with a proven ability to discover, support and elevate original talent.”
Ferguson said Warner Bros. is a natural fit for Oddfellows as both companies share the “same passion for talent.”
“Warner Bros. they have a history of, at least particularly recently, or a track record of making director-driven movies. Mike and Pam, who run the studio, are filmmaker-first executives, and I think they can see that in my space, we have a track record of supporting filmmakers and wanting them to keep working with us, like Oz and Kane,” said Ferguson referring to Longlegs and The Monkey director Osgood Perkins and Backrooms director Kane Parsons.
That recent Warner Bros. track record Ferguson points to is success of the Academy Award-winning One Battle After Another and Sinners.
“Those both (were) big bets on filmmakers that not every studio would have the balls to do,” said Ferguson.
While the deal directly benefits Oddfellows, Ferguson agrees that it is good news financially as well as creatively for the $3 billion film industry here in B.C.
“I think it shows that the myth that you have to move to L.A. to start a real company is a myth, and you can just do it here. I think that symbolically means a lot,” said Ferguson. “I also think it means we’re going to be bringing some of the highest quality and classiest movies in the world to B.C. and making it with our people here the way we’ve made all of our movies in the past, and that’s going to affect the level of opportunity for people here.”
A key ingredient to Oddfellows’ success has been the Vancouver crew that Ferguson has assembled and uses for each of his projects.
“Chris Ferguson and his merry band of brilliant collaborators at Oddfellows did nothing less than teach me what it actually means to be a filmmaker; we discovered Longlegs as a collective and without their inspiration and impact, I’d still be just some guy,” said Perkins, who also wrote the Nicholas Cage-starring film that, to date, has made close to $130 million on a $10-million budget.
Ferguson and Perkins, who formed the production company Phobos last year, also worked together on The Monkey, which had a $10-million budget and brought in close to $70 million at the box office.
The pair have also teamed up for the upcoming feature The Young People starring Nicole Kidman and Lola Tung, as well they are working on the sequel to Longlegs. Oddfellows is currently in production on 4 X 4: The Event, directed and written by Alex Ullom.
On the heels of Chris Ferguson’s Vancouver production company Oddfellows signing a first look deal with Warner Bros., Backrooms director Kane Parsons had this to say: “I cannot stress enough how integral Chris and the Oddfellows team were to the creation and success of Backrooms. The level of intense care, focus, and trust I found from every individual we worked with was incredibly heartening.”
Parsons, who directed Backrooms at the age of just 20, echoes Perkins’ belief in Ferguson and the team he works with.
“I cannot stress enough how integral Chris and the Oddfellows team were to the creation and success of Backrooms. The level of intense care, focus, and trust I found from every individual we worked with was incredibly heartening,” said Parsons in a statement. “Chris is a fantastically meticulous creative partner and has done a stand-out job of curating a well-oiled, human-centric production system over the last decade. I am very excited to continue collaborating with this lot. They’re great.”
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