2025 was a weird year for Blumhouse. The longtime horror studio had notable duds like M3GAN 2.0, but then Black Phone 2 and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 were moneymakers in the back half of the year. With a stacked 2026 ahead, CEO Jason Blum talked to the Hollywood Reporter about the studio’s next moves and adjusting to the demands of the horror audience.
According to Blum, the future of Blumhouse will involve investing more into well-known IP. Along with the two’s own two hits, he cited Final Destination Bloodlines as proof that “when [people] go to the movies now, they decide before they go. They don’t just show up and say, ‘I wanna see a horror movie’—more often than not, they choose something that means something to them more than just a title.”
That being said, he knows how important originals are to horror, and stressed that Blumhouse won’t just become packed with IP after IP like Disney. The studio will “always continue to do originals,” but lean more a bit more toward properties rather than an even 50/50 split like it’s done in the past. Blum explained the shift was spurred by the early COVID era, where audiences weren’t really looking to see a movie in theaters unless they knew what it was or already had an attachment to it, like Spider-Man: No Way Home. And since there “has to be a reason to go,” which is how the first Five Nights at Freddy’s wound up “our biggest movie” when it came out in 2023.
If you like Blumhouse’s originals, you can look forward to Obsession in May and October’s Other Mommy. But you’ll have to wait a while, since they’re each after Lee Cronin’s The Mummy and Insidious: The Bleeding World.
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