At New York Comic Con 2024, I had the chance to speak with Leigh Whannell, who directed, co-wrote, and executive produced Wolf Man. The movie will be released in theaters on January 17.

Christopher Abbott stars as Blake, a San Francisco husband and father, who inherits his remote childhood home in rural Oregon after his own father vanishes and is presumed dead. With his marriage to his high-powered wife, Charlotte, fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to take a break from the city and visit the property with their young daughter, Ginger. But as the family approaches the farmhouse in the dead of night, they’re attacked by an unseen animal and, in a desperate escape, barricade themselves inside the home as the creature prowls the perimeter. As the night stretches on, however, Blake begins to behave strangely, transforming into something unrecognizable, and Charlotte will be forced to decide whether the terror within their house is more lethal than the danger without.

We discussed sharing the trailer with an audience, the movie theater experience, what he learned from working on the project, and more. Keep reading for everything he shared!

Can you tell me what it was like to give fans this first taste at NYCC during the BlumFest panel? I imagine it was a very surreal experience to see everyone here.
Leigh Whannell: I mean, it was surreal. I was sort of craning my neck to see the trailer, so I didn’t have the best view of it, but this is the fun part. The movies, as you know, are so hard to make, they take such a long time. The fun part is when you unleash it onto the world. It can backfire on you, like when you unleash it in the world and the world says, “No, rejected,” right? Which happens, especially today with social media, if people don’t like a movie en masse, you’re gonna hear about it. You’ve probably heard some things about movies people don’t like.

Listen, I don’t think this is gonna be one of them. I’m ready for all the hype.
Okay, good. I mean, that’s what you want. Getting people to pay attention to a movie these days is so difficult because there’s so much stuff out there between video games, social media, TikTok videos, and everything else that’s out there. It’s just this constant river of competition for people’s eyeballs, and I’m up the back like, “Hey guys, got a new Wolf Man movie out.” So if there was a situation where it was being hyped up, that would be the best because hype creates its own momentum, and I want to get people in the movie theater. I don’t want them to watch it at home, I want them to sit in a theater. It’s so good. I had such a good experience last week in a movie theater. It just really restored my faith in the fact that movies are “dead,” people still love movies.

I feel like if I were involved in a movie, the first thing I would do is sneak into a theater and go see it with a packed audience. Have you ever done that? And if you haven’t, are you planning to do it for Wolf Man?
Yes, I will do it for Wolf Man. It can be tough, it depends. If your movie’s doing well, it’s great. I have walked into theaters and gone, “Wow, it looks like no one wanted to see Dead Silence tonight.” But I have had the opposite experience. I still remember great nights, we used to have this tradition, James Wan and I, and our agents would rent a limo and drive around a bunch of theaters. The night that Saw came out, we went around and you would see these theaters, we would watch people react to the ending and it was visceral. It was like a rock concert, people would scream and yell. Then, again with Insidious, we would watch the crowds. So I’ve had really good experiences doing that, I think I’ll do it for Wolf Man. 

You have to.
All right, you’ve inspired me. I’ll do it. Those are fun when you pop out and go, hi! But I’m gonna do it. I need to do it. We were in COVID for a long time indoors. It’s time to get out there. 

It’s time to celebrate. When you look back on the experience, what is one challenge that sticks out, maybe something that you hadn’t faced on a previous project and what did it teach you? 
That’s interesting. I think one thing that this film taught me about is time management because prior to this movie — I don’t think much about the shoot when I’m writing, I like to write freely, right? Then, you just get to set. What happened on this movie is I got to set and I was like, “Wow, all those things I wrote are really hard.” Without knowing it, I had just created the most difficult experience with children, night shoots, and makeup and it couldn’t be any more difficult, right? I would turn to the on-set producer, Bea, many times and say, “I’ve got the opening line of my next script,” and she’d say, “What is it?” I would say, “Exterior, Positano, day. That’s all I have, I just want things to be easier.” But also, in all seriousness, when things are difficult, you know there’s a chance of it being — I would almost be suspicious of something that was easy. But I definitely learned that on this movie, be careful what you write because you’re gonna have to shoot it. That’s a big lesson.