Horror is Setting Records, but is Blumhouse Still Competing?

As Scott Derrickson’s Black Phone 2 continues to ring up what’s likely a much-needed profit for Blumhouse, with Deadline projected a $12M second weekend at the box office for a film that’s already scored $55M in its first week. It’s a film that could’ve fallen victim to sequel fatigue, much like the recent offering of M3gan 2.0 from the same studio but continues an impressive win streak for horror that’s been brewing for the better part of a decade.  

The success of Black Phone 2 itself shouldn’t be surprising, seeing as Ethan Hawke’s ‘The Grabber’ villain is among an exclusive group, alongside characters such as Art the Clown of the Terrifier franchise, Mia Goth’s Pearl, and Bill Skarsgaard’s interpretation of Pennywise, as a horror icon to emerge in the last decade. The original just three years ago made $161M at the global box office to favorable audience and critic scores, has amassed over $2M in blu-ray sales in the U.S. marking strong home video returns in an era where home video is less common than ever, and has been a hit on streaming. The film comes at a time where its stars, Hawke and Marcus Thames, are both garnering massive press for their other projects. Hawke has The Lowdown, a hit Hulu show where he channels Jeff Bridges’ ‘The Dude’ in a neo-noir mystery with Keith David, and Blue Moon, which releases wide this weekend and is expected to get him his first Oscar nomination since Boyhood. Thames also has a lot of good will to work with from his first foray into a big-budget studio film this year with the live-action How To Train Your Dragon, and his own movie releasing this weekend, Regretting You. All in all, this movie should be an easy hit. Yet, it still finds itself underperforming even its tentative second weekend projections from a few days ago. Regardless, it being a soft hit pulls Blumhouse back from yet another year where they’re on the brink of disaster, despite a report out of Comscore that touts the success of horror in 2025.  

With the success of the follow up to The Black Phone, horror has now amassed over $1.2B at the domestic box office. This figure means that horror in the United States has generated more box office dollars than it has as a genre in any year in history, surpassing 2017’s record of $1.16B, and has done so before Halloween, with releases such as the New Years Eve showings of Stranger Things, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 and Silent Night, Deadly Night still on the horizon. The interesting aspect of the box office performance of horror in 2025 is that the overall box office is down 9% from where it was at this time in 2023, though the Barbenheimer craze in a post-pandemic environment may have bolstered the box office far beyond reasonable expectations, considering the 2025 box office is slightly up year-to-date compared to 2024. However when you compare the box office to 2017 when the record was originally set, the box office is projected to make approximately $5.5B less cumulatively on the year. There are a variety of reasons for that: the pandemic taking audiences out of theatrical viewing habits, the mass proliferation of home media, the rise of streaming re-training audiences, algorithms that make movies harder to market, a struggling economy where entertainment is the first thing cut from the consumers discretionary spending, and a variety of other contributing factors that are a topic for another day, but the reality is that it is not the same box office climate of eight years ago. 

This outcome shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, in fact, it feels like it’s been building this way for quite some time. It grossed in excess of $700M at the worldwide box office in 2017, the largest box office draw for a horror ever, finishing 13th on the year. The next highest on the list is 31st ranked Anabelle: Creation, making just over $300M. Joining the $200M club for horror was also Split and Get Out. That made for a very top heavy horror box office in 2017, with the top four alone making around $745M of the $1.2B domestic share, or around 62% of the share across just those four films. Since, A24 has risen to become a major player in horror, NEON has made its mark, MUBI’s recent horror releases have made the independent portion of the genre more accessible, and IFC’s Shudder has made noise within the genre with its decisions for theatrical exhibitions. That’s not to mention, with the stark growth of the genre came a rise to studio horror. This year alone, Warner Bros has set the record for most films in a row to open to at least $40M, and those films include Sinners, The Conjuring: Last Rites, Weapons, and Final Destination: Bloodlines. That’s not including the remainder of their slate that includes Companion, which turned a box office profit. Studios are building horror slates because horror is what is delivering in 2025. There’s a lot of conjecture on what might be the cause. Some people believe the studies that show that horror booms always coincide with tumultuous societies, noting the original horror boom in the 1970s during the Vietnam War, using distrust and cynicism in society at large and seemingly gratuitous violence that reflected the world around the movies that were made. The 2000s saw an uptick in torture porn that reflected a post-9/11 world. Currently? We are in an era of elevated horror that focuses directly on anxieties surrounding social identities, exploration of trauma, and a world entrenched in algorithmic calamity. Others put forth the idea that horror is such an immersive experience, that the theatrical experience enhances not only the immersion, but provides a communal experience that brings a comfort within the immersion. Some even believe that in a time where money is as tight as it’s ever been for people, horror as a genre guarantees a certain level of safeness in its selection. Great horror is a visceral, personal experience that can be cathartic, but even horror that isn’t particularly strong presents a certain level of tension and gore, so there’s still something that delivers theatrically. Regardless of the timing of a boom period, it’s not just that franchises are hitting, it’s that franchises that were dead, such as Final Destination, are hitting because studios are allowing filmmakers to revive their tentpole IP with original ideas, rather than just delivering IP offerings to reach arbitrary quotas for their shareholders. They are also trusting filmmakers to make original horror with original concepts. 

One could easily become persnickety every time a movie, especially of the horror variety, underperforms expectations at the box office as to why it might have underperformed, but this leaves one clear omission: Blumhouse. Blumhouse has made its name with low-budget, but gritty and disgusting horror. Despite the recent horror boom, Blumhouse themselves are on their coldest streak ever. Night Swim drowned at the box office, Imaginary couldn’t imagine any profit, Wolf Man will be the forgotten about Julia Garner 2025 horror offering, while Woman in the Yard, Drop, and M3gan 2.0 all undershot expectations. In the last two calendar years, Black Phone 2 is only their second hit, with the James McAvoy vehicle Speak No Evil being their only other film to turn into anything. Even with Black Phone 2's hopeful profitability, its legs are struggling as supported by the 60% drop in its second weekend. It'll turn a profit, but not nearly as one as even a modest hit sequel such as Paramount's Smile 2, which made $130M on a comparable budget. If the model was that Blumhouse would spend anywhere from $2M-$5M on ten separate films, play the odds, one becomes a hit and you franchise that hit, it was a profitable model for them. The issue isn’t that Blumhouse’s quality is suddenly significantly less than it was before, their quality has always been hit or miss, and they’re still delivering fun films even now with things like Speak No Evil and the Black Phone franchise. But for every Paranormal Activity and Insidious, there was a The Bay or The Lords of Salem. People also misremember Blumhouse as this horror-exclusive studio, despite the fact that they’re the same studio that had a hand in creating more commercial plays ranging from The Tooth Fairy to Whiplash. It wasn’t until the last decade or so that they went all-in on horror almost exclusively. But its decision at the time seemed to be sound, as its largest profits tended to come from their horror division.

Unfortunately for Blumhouse, half the problem just might be when they decided to go all-in on horror.

Their offerings in the 2000s during a relatively down period for the genre seemed to deliver as even forgotten horror films, such as Dark Skies and Oculus proved to be modest hits in miniscule budgets. However, that doesn’t seem to be much of the strategy as they’ve gone all in on horror. Horror as a genre has always been relatively inexpensive, but the $3M< that needs to make $7M< to be profitable is a thing of the past for Blumhouse, especially considering budgets such as M3GAN 2.0 that demand a minimum of $63M to break even, while they try to commercialize a cult classic. When you take a January horror movie and make it a summer blockbuster action movie with 3x the budget, releasing it on the same day as a Brad Pitt blockbuster and two weeks before Superman, of course it’s going to have diminishing returns. Blumhouse’s whole strategy has seemed to pivot with the horror boom by deviating from their successful strategy and commercializing as much of their IP as possible, but their IP wasn’t meant to be commercial in the first place. The question every movie has to ask is “who is this being made for?” and in a time where Blumhouse’s target demo is spending more than ever, they’re leaving the target demo without any semblance of a plan of who they want to attract.   

Perhaps the biggest hurdle for Blumhouse in 2025 is that they’re simply a production company, whereas their direct rivals in the marketshare, A24 and NEON, primarily distribute, and thus, have far more control over the marketing of the film with inherently better selection thanks in part to buying finished projects. However, you can only blame so many failures on marketing before it becomes your movie and/or your business models. Blumhouse deviated from their business model when multiple independent players performed their business model better than they did, but they’ve also changed who their movies are for, which makes for a disastrous marketing campaign that everybody but Blumhouse themselves have to deal with. You can only market “M3GAN is a super hot warrior princess,” whatever that even means, without that scene even being in the final cut of the film despite being all over the trailers, so much before you ultimately have to tell people what the movie is even about. Their films have reached such a tonal shift that not only can their distributors not properly market the film, but audiences know not to show up. Audiences know that in 2025, there’s likely to be little gore and even fewer deaths in a Blumhouse film. For a movie like Blackphone that’s more psychological, that’s fine, but for a fanbase that was built upon R-rated horror, to pivot to PG-13 family horror in a time where R-rated horror is more viable than ever, seems like a colossal misstep that could have been prevented.  

For Blumhouse, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 can’t come fast enough. While it remains to be seen how the sequel will do, the first made around $300M on just a $20M budget, and Black Phone 2 will make them healthier as they go all in on the pizzeria animatronics. Regardless, the fact remains that Blumhouse’s 2025 slate revolved around its only three hits in the decade, and they’re only batting .500 so far. In a time where horror movies are more accessible and its audience has more spending power than ever, one of the industry leaders is doing whatever the movie industry version of living paycheck-to-paycheck is. How much longer is Blumhouse in the horror industry? How much longer until there’s another change to their business model? These are questions that need to be asked eventually. 

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Photo credits: Universal Pictures.