Blumhouse founder Jason Blum has an axe to grind when he hears people say Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” is not a horror film. Admittedly, the movie is a genre-bending period film and folk fable about the roots of blues music, but it’s got vampires killing people in it, so it’s a horror movie. And Blum wants you to know it.
“Sinners’” box office success — $350 million worldwide to date — has defied expectations for what an original horror film can do, and even though Blum didn’t make it, it’s good for his business when the genre as a whole thrives. But much of the discussion around that movie before its release was its hefty budget — a reported $90 million — that complicated its path to profitability. For Blum, he’s built his empire on movies made on the cheap that can still be marketed as events, break out in a big way, and spawn franchises. But as Blumhouse has scaled up and the demand for horror has increased, Blumhouse can’t make movies as modestly, and the industry too runs into challenges to continue to make horror movies work financially.
Blum on Tuesday took the stage in Hollywood at a press event called The Business of Fear, in which he and a panel of Blumhouse and Atomic Monster associates discussed box office trends for the genre and how horror has evolved over the years, such that the genre “horror” can’t be viewed so narrowly. IndieWire asked him about “Sinners,” a movie he says is “one of my favorite horror movies I’ve seen in a long time,” and why he felt “Sinners” was the rare exception to the rule about making horror movies work on such a massive scale.
“We are definitely not interested in doing movies with that size a budget. That said, I’m glad they had the budget that they had because I think it really helped make the movie rich and incredible and amazing; but we are not going to make horror movies at that level anytime soon, maybe ever,” Blum said in the panel discussion. “The bigger the budget, the more strain on the creative and the more sanding down of edges. And I think, generally speaking, ‘Sinners’ being the exception, the product is less interesting. So we are committed to lower budgets to continue to be able to take creative risks and do interesting things, which I think is harder to do when you have more money.”
Blumhouse, following its merger with James Wan’s Atomic Monster, has scaled up significantly such that it needs to have “major studio-level success,” as Blum puts it. That means $100 million+ movies, which even for Blum and Wan is rare for movies made for just $1 million. He acknowledges that an indie like last year’s “Longlegs” pulled off the feat, and films like “Terrifier 3” came dang close, Blum said today “it’s much harder to do what we started doing 15 years ago.”
“So the way that we’ve addressed that is by adding a bit of money to our model; but still, by studio standards, for instance, the budgets of our movies are 60 percent off the average sticker price, actually probably more, 75 percent off, the average sticker price,” Blum said.
Blumhouse has five remaining movies on its slate for 2025, all of them sequels, including “M3GAN 2.0,” “Five Night’s at Freddy’s 2,” a new “Conjuring” movie, “The Black Phone 2,” and “Mortal Kombat 2.” At the event, Blumhouse also announced it’s in development on “Ma 2,” with Octavia Spencer set to return. But it’s threading a needle in finding original properties that someday can be the next major franchise for Blumhouse.
Together with Atomic Monster it’s branching out into video games, an exciting growth area to tell other horror stories, but Blumhouse president Abhijay Prakash explained that they’re positioned to adapt one of those games into a film should one break out, though that wasn’t the reason it launched the division. Blumhouse also announced at the event it will be adapting another indie horror game hit, “Phasmaphobia.”
Blum is also staying true to the company’s philosophy about finding good stories, things that are genuinely scary, rather than trying to stack them with stars or buzzy directors and figure out the rest later. IndieWire asked Blum about a recent viral video from Charli XCX in which she pitched the idea of a “Final Destination” movie starring all “It Girls,” and directed by Coralie Fargeat for good measure. Blum hadn’t seen the video, but he’d want to hear a bit more.
“Generally, I am not a fan, I think no one on this panel is, of reverse-engineering movies. You never get a good result,” he said. “It’s how, unfortunately, the vast majority of movies are made, but it’s very hard to get a good movie reverse-engineering it.”
Blum added the studio is unlikely to again release a movie day-and-date in theaters and on Peacock as it did with “Five Nights at Freddy’s” but won’t be repeating with the sequel. Horror works best in the theater, not at home, and it’s the reason the genre has consistently grown in popularity and still hasn’t reached its peak. He says it will lead to movies that are one day constructed very differently for theatrical than they are for streaming — not just a difference in quality or budgets — and horror is very equipped for that evolution.
“Horror, in my mind, is the only genre that you just can’t get what you are going to see a horror movie for at home on TV. It doesn’t work,” he said. “The only way to be really scared is when your phone is not with you and when you are in a dark room with a lot of other people and you are fully focused on a movie. You guys try it. Watch a horror movie on streaming, and when you know a scare is coming, look away for two seconds and look back. It stops working. It’s just, your suspension of disbelief is broken, and when you are leading that up to a scare, you are just not scared. It’s actually made horror in cinema stronger.”
