“In many ways, it’s like there are two separate industries,” says actor/producer Elijah Wood. “The studios and everyone else.”

Wood, a veteran of blockbusters like Lord of the Rings and daring indies like Maniac, knows from experience how tough Hollywood can be for movies coming from outside the system. So he and his business partners Josh Waller and Daniel Noah are out to fix it. The team has expanded their six-year-old horror production company, SpectreVision, into Company X: an umbrella organization that applies their patented art-driven approach to films of any genre and budget.

“There’s a massive class gap [in Hollywood],” explains Noah, who leads development for Company X. “In today’s world, there are either $200-million blockbusters or tiny indies made for less than $1 million. [Movies that fall] in the middle tend not to exist.”

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That large middle ground includes scripts that require a larger budget than indies but aren’t big enough for a tentpole spot on a studio’s slate. According to Noah, films like Blade and 28 Days Later would never see production in today’s fragmented industry.

“Another example is character-driven film like 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice which starred Natalie Wood, Elliott Gould, etc.,” continues Noah. “In 2016, it literally couldn’t be a blockbuster. At best it would be a sub-$1 million Sundance film, and—if it did manage to get marquee actors involved—would go to a studio and become inflated to the point where it no longer made economic sense.”

That’s where Wood, Waller, and Noah come in. For the past six years, they built Spectrevision to champion out-of-the-box, indie horror films (Cooties, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, The Greasy Strangler) that might otherwise have never seen the light of day. “In order for Spectrevision to pursue a project, it had to be not only a film all three of us wanted to make, but a film all three of us wanted to watch,” adds Waller. “If any one of us didn’t have an immediate heart reaction to the material, it wasn’t a fit.”

Spectrevision is now a subsidiary of Company X, which also includes Lisa Whalen as a partner and C.E.O.; it will serve as a content production vehicle for feature films, shorts, television, and video games. There’s even a virtual-reality partnership with Ubisoft.