Has Blumhouse recently taken a stumble or a fall?
Hello readers, I hope you are all well. As Afraid releases today, I wanted to focus this blog post on Blumhouse Productions.
If you have gone to the cinemas within the last decade or so to watch a horror movie, you will constantly see one production company appearing on screen: Blumhouse Productions. Blumhouse was founded by Jason Blum and Amy Israel, but it's solely run by Jason Blum now (Blumhouse). Their business model has them giving funding to smaller-budget film projects, with the projects running between $10 and $15 million (Collider).
It is not completely unreasonable to argue that Blumhouse has been a massive help in regard to modern horror, as if you follow the money, it will lead you to some of the best horror films in recent years, for example 2010’s Insidious and quite frankly many more. They have produced many great films that have been critical and financial successes, which has furthered their status as a horror giant each time. It was seen for a while that they were unstoppable and essentially had monopoly over the genre for years. However, this may have caused them to take some missteps and produce some films that aren’t to the usual Blumhouse standard, thus starting a trend of oversaturation to occur within their films and the overall genre. As these films don’t particularly stand out and leave a mark on the genre, like Paranormal Activity did in 2009. I want to say that Blumhouse have never been the perfect horror company, with them having their hands involved in many dreadful film productions such as Paranormal Activity 4 (2012) and Ouija (2014). I personally believe this downward spiral began around the early months of 2018, with such releases as Insidious: The Last Key (January) and Truth or Dare (April). While these were still hugely financially successful, they were absolutely hated by critics. This is a common occurrence in this phenomenon. The previously mentioned missteps are most likely to be motivated by money, as Blumhouse has come to the conclusion that the quality of the movies has no real impact on the box office. So, they have started to fund as many features as they can, as no matter what, they will bring a profit. This trend is still extremely present with this year’s releases; for example, Imaginary (arguably one of the worst of the year) had a rough budget of $10-$13 million and then made $43.6 million (Box Office Mojo). This highlights that they have switched their focus to quantity over quality.
This recent dip in quality has allowed two other production companies to rise and make their own offensive attack against Blumhouse: A24 and NEON. This is especially relevant to A24, whose horror rise didn’t really have an effect until Ari Aster’s ‘Hereditary’. Which shocked audiences in the summer of 2018. It was a real financial and critical success, which put a huge spotlight on A24 and allowed them to hit the ground running in regard to making an impact on horror. As they continued to push out some truly unsettling horror movies that did extremely well satisfying audiences and critics. I argue that this is because A24 doesn’t push out as many horror movies as Blumhouse, thus allowing the filmmakers more time to work on their project and release the best product possible. NEON is remarkably similar with their approach. NEON is the newest company in this conversation, especially in regard to horror. It slowly moved up the conversation after every consecutive year but has really shined so far in 2024 with the release of Oz Perkins: Longlegs. This, by no doubt, has increased their spread within the horror genre. The two companies have produced unique projects in comparison to Blumhouse, which has caused horror fans to lose some interest in most Blumhouse productions and be more intrigued by less saturated projects that A24 and NEON are involved in.
Overall, I do not believe that Blumhouse have lost their touch to produce great horror but it’s disappointing and almost heart-breaking to see them fall into greed and lose their priority of making standout horror like they used to. I hope they realign their focus back to funding worthwhile projects that break the horror mold, like they used to.
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Twitter: BigSmithy123
References:
https://collider.com/jason-blum-blumhouse-budget/#:~:text=Something%20that's%20different%20is%20our,you%20know%2C%20difficult%20theatrical%20marketplace.
https://www.blumhouse.com/films
https://www.blumhouse.com/about
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3180495617/
https://a24films.com/films
https://neonrated.com/