Blumhouse Horror Isn’t As Dangerous As It Used To Be

Over the past 15 years, Blumhouse has hacked a gaping wound into filmgoing consciousness with a steady flow of low-budget, high-margin horror: the Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and Purge franchises that have combined to gross more than $2 billion; the 2018 Halloween reboot (worldwide gross $260 million on a $10 million production budget); and Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, Get Out (which launched the comedian’s second career as a final-cut filmmaker), to name but a few of the company’s numerous hits. But more recently — around Hollywood if not across the broader culture — Blumhouse has become synonymous with a different kind of cinematic bloodletting.

Since the beginning of last year, Blumhouse has been on a cold streak, releasing an almost uninterrupted string of box-office disappointments. In January 2024, the poorly reviewed Night Swim drowned theatrically, followed in failure by the murderous teddy bear-flick Imaginary (which did not hemorrhage money due to its relatively microscopic budget but is regarded as a dud). That left the vacation-friends spatter-fest Speak No Evil to provide Blumhouse’s only positive cash flow for the year. Leading into this weekend, the Universal-partnered production company’s entire 2025 slate had fizzled: the Julia Garner biomorph-scarer Wolf Man, the supernatural “trow-ma” Woman in the Yard, and the SXSW-anointed digital-dependency potboiler Drop all undershot financial expectations en route to M3gan 2.0, Blumhouse’s reigning ’25 disaster.

At a time when horror competition from A24’s Talk to Me, Warner Bros.’ Weapons, and Neon’s Longlegs has been increasingly carving into the Blumhouse market share, the steady drumbeat of Ls has left some industry observers wondering: Is the company’s eponymous head honcho, Jason Blum, losing his ability to scare up audiences?

Over the weekend, Blumhouse responded to that second-guessing with a less-than-decisive “maybe not.” In its first three days of wide release, the company’s Ethan Hawke–led, serial-child-abductor creepfest Black Phone 2 took in $27.3 million to claim the top spot at the box office and become Blumhouse’s biggest opening of the year. But in an era when the box office is down 11 percent from the same time last year (and 20 percent below what movies brought in prior to COVID-19), opening-weekend supremacy comes with asterisks.

While slightly outpacing the financial benchmark set by 2021’s The Black Phone — a pandemic-era hit that debuted to $23.6 million and eventually took in a robust $161.4 million — that kind of return sits about square with pre-release “tracking” estimates that predicted BP2 opening to between $25 million and $30 million. And although the movie earned a decent 74 percent “fresh” on the Tomatometer, Black Phone 2 scored a lowly B from the audience exit poll Cinemascore — unwelcome news for Blumhouse, considering that the industry regards any Cinemascore below a B+ as a negative augury for long-term playability. Moreover, a $27.3 million opening for the return of Hawke’s demonically masked Grabber character isn’t so grabby in comparison with last month’s rollout of The Conjuring: Last Rites: another major-market horror sequel that raked in $84 million over its North American opening weekend (and an additional $175.4 million internationally).

As The Outside Scoop analyst Scott Mendelson puts it, Blumhouse simply “isn’t the brand name that they were in the mid- to late-2010s.” What’s the problem? In many ways, it’s a franchise-management issue. Early on, Blumhouse prioritized original IP, giving unknown directors relatively free reign on shoestring budgets to generate sequel after sequel in-house. But in more recent years, the company has turned to rebooting classic yesteryear horror franchises. Among them: The Exorcist (in 2021, Universal paid an eye-watering $400 million for Blumhouse to take over the long-running, religious-horror series) and Halloween (between 2018 and 2022, the company put out a trilogy of rebooted movies directed by David Gordon Green and co-starring original franchise damsel in distress Jamie Lee Curtis).

“I think there’s a case to be made that the first Halloween was so successful Blumhouse as a company got bit by the IP bug,” Mendelson says. “The Halloween trilogy kicked off a new era in which Blumhouse became just as likely to try to revitalize some other horror property that you’ve heard of as develop their own thing.” (Blumhouse lost auction rights for a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to A24 last month.)

Unfortunately, those reboots can carry high overhead costs. In 2023, critics almost universally damned The Exorcist: Believer with horrible reviews; it took in $136.2 million against a $30 million budget to become a decent enough hit. But that’s hardly the kind of runaway smash to justify Universal’s nearly half-billion-dollar IP outlay. In June, a second Blumhouse Exorcist to be directed by Haunting of Hill House horror-teur Mike Flanagan was removed from Universal’s 2026 schedule and indefinitely postponed.

Then there is the fiasco of June’s M3gan 2.0. Where the first M3gan’s Olsen-faced murder machine surprised and delighted audiences — costing $12 million, grossing $180 million — the higher-concept, bigger-budget, Terminator 2–esque part deux shocked Hollywood with its inability to scare butts into seats. 2.0’s production budget was reportedly $25 million; its worldwide ticket sales, $39 million. A flop when you factor in prints and advertising costs. “We all thought M3gan was like Superman — we could do anything to her,” Blum said on The Town podcast. “We kind of classically overthought how powerful people’s engagement was, really, with her.”

I asked a rival producer with a long track record of horror blockbusters if he thinks Blum has lost his touch. “Everyone goes through cold streaks,” this producer says. “There’s so much more competition. It’s hard to maintain your position. And if you look back across Blumhouse’s entire slate, they had tons of things that didn’t work. The good ones made them look great while paying for the losses.”

“Now it’s just tougher and tougher to get circuit placement for these movies. So the losses are more noticeable,” he adds.

Whether Black Phone 2 “legs out” (i.e., remains in theaters with minimal attendance drops week by week to become a hit) or slinks from the multiplex after breaking even, Blumhouse has a final 2025 title: Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 hits wide release on December 5. It’s another sequel, this time to the fake-Chuck-E-Cheese slash-’em-up Five Nights at Freddy’s that earned a staggering $291.4 million against a $20 million production budget two years ago. According to Mendelson, its calculus of profitability will be simple: “The movies are so cheap, the first one was so successful, and the fan base barely cares whether it’s a good movie or not.”

Still, he laments that even a worldwide hit won’t bring back the world-beating, take-no-prisoners Blumhouse of a seemingly bygone era. “They have felt safe compared to their competition,” he concludes. “Blumhouse used to be dangerous!”