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EXCLUSIVE: Focus Features and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster have snapped up Play House, a micro-budget horror film from Nicolas Curcio, in a competitive situation, sources tell Deadline.

We’re told this was a seven-figure deal for worldwide rights, excluding Latin America and India. This is a major coup for Curcio’s debut feature, a film made for just $100,000 — roughly 13% of the reported budget of Curry Barker’s low-budget Focus phenomenon Obsession.

Curcio set the project in motion last September after winning the inaugural Fantastic Pitches contest, a micro-budget genre initiative spearheaded by Alamo Drafthouse’s Fantastic Fest and indie studio Chroma, thereby securing funding and distribution. He returned to Fantastic Fest to premiere the film last month.

Play House will release in theaters in 2027, with Universal Pictures International handling international distribution.

Written by Curcio and wife/creative partner Kirby Gladstein, the film follows Elliott (Will Harrison), who while renovating a dilapidated house to win back his ex, discovers VHS tapes of an unaired children’s TV show which begins to seep into his life, threatening his last chance at reconciliation.

Pic’s cast also includes Jessica Sula, Jordan Gonzalez, and James Urbaniak. Curcio and Gladstein produced for Skinny Ghost, alongside Ben Gojer, Jack Forbes, and Derek Tramont. Exec producers include Ahbra Perry via Chroma, Daniel Levin via Narrative, Adam Hendricks and Greg Gilreath of Divide/Conquer, and Jason Blum of Blumhouse Atomic-Monster. NPerry repped the film for sales via Narrative Distribution.

While Universal art-house label Focus Features has not historically been known as a major horror distributor, outside of recent work with Robert Eggers on titles like Nosferatu and the upcoming Werwulf, they’re now aggressively expanding into the space as supporters of emerging filmmakers, after seeing Obsession break out as their highest-grossing film ever at over $522M worldwide. Divide/Conquer’s Hendricks and Gilreath — EPs on Play House — previously brought that film to Blum, who set it up at Focus, along with his follow-up Anything but Ghosts, dated for May 7, 2027.

You can expect much more to come from the collaboration between Focus Features and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster. Most recently, they announced their partnership on director Josh Giuliano’s Occupant following the buzzy TIFF debut of his first horror film, River.

Curcio is a rising filmmaker who recently set up his high-concept thriller spec Sweet Spot, penned with Gladstein, at Paramount Primal, as we first reported. A writer on Sony Pictures Animation’s hit GOAT, he has developed projects for multiple studios, including a live-action Magic School Bus for Universal and an adaptation of Planet of the Nerds for Paramount. His script Barron made the Black List in 2019.

Curcio is also known for running a popular screenwriting TikTok account with nearly 200K followers and over 10M likes, and has partnered with studios like Neon, A24 and Paramount to promote films. He is repped by 3 Arts, UTA, and Jackoway Austen Tyerman.

So many unlikely stories went into the making of both parts of director Julia Loktev‘s sprawling “My Undesirable Friends” movies, which total nearly 12 hours, or half a day in a viewer’s life.

For 2025’s “Part I — Last Air in Moscow,” the Russian-American filmmaker, based in New York, didn’t know that when she arrived in Moscow in fall 2021, she’d capture the implosion of the country’s only remaining independent news network, TV Rain, under Vladimir Putin. Nor did she anticipate that, for this year’s sequel “Part II — Exile,” she’d then follow that mostly female dissident journalism collective as they dispersed across Europe after Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Nor that Meryl Streep would sign on as executive producer, let alone watch her movie, to help promote the Venice premiere during the stateside awards season.

Often during the Oscar corridor, a celebrity will pin their imprimatur to a worthy documentary or short film to get word out. But what’s in a name without real weight behind it?

“It’s a kind of funny story,” Loktev told IndieWire. “I always wonder the same thing actually, also. I have to admit, I don’t hang out with Meryl Streep regularly. But I was working before ‘My Undesirable Friends’ on a fiction film that Colin Firth was going to produce, and it fell apart during COVID. And then the events of this [film] started. So I reached out to Colin with ‘My Undesirable Friends.’ I was like, ‘Will you watch it?’ And I was like, ‘Can you think of anyone to sort of present it, maybe?’”

Loktev wanted the executive producer to ideally “be a woman because it’s a film about women. And he was like, ‘Well, I could send it to Meryl.’ And I was like, ‘That would be awesome,’ right? The way that she told the story when she presented the film is that Colin wrote her and said, ‘You have to watch this. It’s essential,’ which caused her to roll her eyes.”

You hear “essential,” and you’re just like, “No,” as Loktev explained. “She was super busy, and apparently, the way that she told the story, she sat down thinking, out of respect to Colin Firth, ‘I will sit down and watch this for 15 minutes’ — and then got up five and a half hours later. So it’s an incredible story. Then, she really just offered to help in any way she could. So she’s a kind of patron saint angel.”

“Part II – Exile” also now counts Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras among the executive producers, a natural fit for a director who’s brushed against state scrutiny for her muckraking portraits. Loktev’s position as a Russia-born American has inured her to the persecution faced by her documentary subjects, whom the Kremlin labeled “foreign agents” for broadcasting news that questioned and criticized Putin’s regime.

Among the reporters and news anchors whom Loktev’s extraordinarily intimate epic follows in the sequel: the former TV Rain anchor Anna Nemzer, who flees to Georgia and then New York; Elena Kostyuchenko, who may have been the victim of poisoning by the Kremlin; and TV Rain journalist Peter Ruzavin and Ukrainian reporter Nataliya Gumenyuk, whose relationship unfolds across Zoom calls between Vienna and Ukraine. Journalists Ksenia Mironova and Valeria Ratnikova (TV Rain’s youngest anchor), meanwhile, are now in New York City and attending Q&As this weekend. After news of the invasion, they fled to Istanbul, where “Part II” kicks off.

Working as a one-woman crew on the film, shooting only via iPhone, proved empowering for Loktev as a director. “The fact that I was shooting alone without a crew made the logistics infinitely easier,” she said. “You don’t have to book a crew … sometimes I would wake up in New York, and something would happen in Europe, and I’d have to wake up, go to the airport, and start shooting off the plane. You don’t have to get a crew. I can figure out how to book a ticket and a hotel room for myself. It makes you really portable and nimble that you can do things when you’re shooting alone. Often I didn’t know I would be told something would be happening the day before or something, or I would just have to be there.”

Loktev, meanwhile, doesn’t want audiences intimidated by the film’s size and scope. Rather than an exhaustive knowledge of the current Russian political climate, “You need empathy and a bit of curiosity and a sense of humor. I always thought that it should be a film about Russia for people who really don’t care about Russia or don’t know about Russia, or without making it dumbed down. But if you hung out with a bunch of young Russian women who were forced to flee their country during the time you were hanging out with them, you kind of figure things out a lot just by hanging out with them. It’s like when you go visit a friend somewhere in another country.”

As for TV Rain, it’s up and running out of Amsterdam, where “most of the hosts have now been declared extremists and terrorists in Russia. Many of them have been sentenced in absentia for speaking about war crimes. They drive the Russian propagandists crazy. The Russian government keeps trying to find ways to block it. They do slow down. It’s like a kind of whack-a-mole situation where Russia will slow down YouTube, which is still accessible, but they slow it down. … Information is increasingly being blocked in Russia because it’s the goal of the Russian government to keep people from learning the truth.”

“My Undesirable Friends: Part II — Exile” is now in select theaters from Mubi.