Jason Blum built a mini-studio empire off a single bet. Two decades ago, he left Miramax — and Harvey Weinstein — behind, betting his career on a $15,000 found-footage horror film shot by an unknown named Oren Peli. That bet, “Paranormal Activity,” became one of the most profitable films in history and launched Blumhouse into the stratosphere of genre filmmaking.
However, in 2025, the man who reshaped the business model for horror is starting struggle.
The numbers don’t lie. Blumhouse is staring down the barrel of a brutal losing streak, with four consecutive box office flops this year: “Wolf Man” ($20M), “The Woman in the Yard” ($22M), Drop ($16M), and most painfully, M3GAN 2.0, which cratered with a $10.2M domestic opening on a $25M+ budget.
To his credit, Blum didn’t run from the blowback. In a weekend interview on The Town podcast, he owned the flop with surprising candor:
“We all thought “Megan” was like Superman. We could do anything to her. We could change genres. We could put her in the summer. We could make her look different. We could turn her from a bad guy into a good guy… And we classically over-thought how powerful people’s engagement was with her.”
He added he was in “pain” all weekend.
Internally, there’s acknowledgment that the 2025 slate was overreaching. THR sources inside Blumhouse say the company is now reassessing its output strategy — especially the ambition to release up to 10 theatrical titles a year.
The studio is also carefully watching “SOULM8TE,” the “M3GAN” spinoff set for January 2026. Insiders insist it’s testing well, but following 2.0’s failure, all eyes are on whether there’s still juice left in the AI-doll IP.
The good news? No one’s panicking — not yet. The reason: the Blumhouse model still works. Its titles are relatively cheap, risks are calculated, and even underperformers often squeak into profitability. As one Universal exec told THR, “We’d be having a different conversation if these were $80 million bets. At the end of the day, every one of these movies will make money.”
Also on the horizon: “The Black Phone 2” in October, and “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” in December. The latter follows a $297M-grossing predecessor that remains Blumhouse’s biggest hit ever. If ‘Freddy’s 2’ connects again, expect a reset of the narrative — fast.
With the review embargo now lifted, the reviews are pretty good, or at least much better than a David Ayer movie has any right to be. The film currently sits at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and 70 on Metacritic.