A new Danny Trejo horror movie is the first from the producer’s Watch This Entertainment, which he founded in 2019 after The Weinstein Co. filed for bankruptcy.
A new Danny Trejo horror movie is the first from the producer’s Watch This Entertainment, which he founded in 2019 after The Weinstein Co. filed for bankruptcy.
For the past few years, Bob Weinstein has been quietly setting up movies under a new label, Watch This Entertainment. On Oct. 11, the first of those films, Seven Cemeteries, will arrive in theaters and on-demand courtesy of Quiver Distribution.
Seven Cemeteries comes to screens as Bob’s older brother and former business partner, Harvey Weinstein, is awaiting a retrial of his landmark 2020 rape conviction, which was overturned in April, and facing a new sexual assault charge in New York.
Directed by John Gulager, produced by Joel Soisson and Talia Bella, and starring Danny Trejo as an ex-con some ranchers hire to protect them from a drug lord, Seven Cemeteries is a return to horror. Bob made his mark in the genre as the founder of Dimension Films in 1992, once Miramax’s profitable horror label and the original home of the Scream and Scary Movie franchises. (Paramount, which now owns the rights to Dimension’s pre-2005 films, found box office success with Scream sequels in 2022 and 2023, and has a new Scary Movie film due in 2025).
Seven Cemeteries is one of three movies in the $2 million to $5 million budget range that Bob Weinstein has produced at Watch This Entertainment, a company of five people based in NYC and L.A. with former Weinstein Co. publicity executive Pantea Ghaderi as president of production and development. Bob manages the company’s financials, approves the scripts and follows films from development through postproduction.
The new films mark Bob’s first projects since The Weinstein Co. filed for bankruptcy in 2018. While Harvey was always the flamboyant showman of the brothers’ businesses, appearing on red carpets and getting thanked at the Oscars, Bob worked behind the scenes, focusing on projects that were more overtly commercial. When Harvey was accused of multiple sexual assaults in 2017, Bob told THR that he was living a “waking nightmare” and said he had thought his brother’s “philandering” with women involved “all consensual situations.”
When Bob first announced Watch This Entertainment in 2019, Time’s Up released a statement accusing him of “complicity” in his brother’s mistreatment of women. “Bob Weinstein has no business running anything, let alone launching a new production company while dozens of survivors are still searching for some small measure of justice,” the statement read. Time’s Up is now defunct.
In addition to Seven Cemeteries, Watch This Entertainment has also completed production on Resurrection Road and is currently seeking distribution for the horror thriller set during the Civil War. Written and directed by Ashley Cahill and starring Malcolm Goodwin (Reacher) and Michael Madsen, Resurrection Road is about a squad of Black soldiers sent to infiltrate a Confederate fort.
Bob’s name is not on Seven Cemeteries or Resurrection Road, but he is expected to take a producing credit on Bird Boy, a family adventure film currently in postproduction, directed by Soisson and starring Téa Leoni and South African actor Tony Kgoroge. A synopsis describes that movie as, “In the vein of Free Willy … an inspirational story about a boy and an ostrich who change each other’s lives forever and teach each other the meaning of friendship.”