Vancouver studio inks major deal with Warner Bros.

Vancouver producer Chris Ferguson’s production company Oddfellows has just signed a first look deal with Warner Bros. Picture Group it was announced on July 14. Photo by Arlen Redekop /PNG

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Vancouver film producer Chris Ferguson and his studio Oddfellows have signed a first-look deal with the Warner Bros. Picture Group.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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.”

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Ferguson said Warner Bros. is a natural fit for Oddfellows as both companies share the “same passion for talent.”

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“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.

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That recent Warner Bros. track record Ferguson points to is success of the Academy Award-winning One Battle After Another and Sinners.

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“Those both (were) big bets on filmmakers that not every studio would have the balls to do,”  said Ferguson.

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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.

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“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.”