It’s inevitable that Hollywood’s infatuation with superheroes will end within the next decade. Romantic comedies have fallen out of favor, as the genre was among the first to migrate almost entirely to streaming; similarly, westerns never attained the same prominence in culture as they did during the dawn of Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti” films in the 1960s. However, it's hard to anticipate that horror cinema will ever face a major decline: it's reliant on an immersive theatrical experience that has adapted to cultural shifts.
Blumhouse Productions was founded in 2000 by producer Jason Blum, but it wasn’t until 2007 that the company developed a unique business model. Due to a creative marketing campaign and strong word-of-mouth, Blum turned the low-budget found footage film Paranormal Activity into a surprise smash hit. Blum’s strategy has proven to be an advantage and detriment to independent horror; while it's never bad to make cheap cinema with an easy path to profitability, Blumhouse has begun to value quantity over quality.
Blumhouse has produced instant classics like Get Out, Sinister, Split, and Insidious, as well as prestige films like BlacKkKlansman and Whiplash; at the same time, it has also spotlighted cheap, low-effort projects from novice directors, many of which would’ve been released direct-to-DVD a decade prior. Blum’s brilliance in marketing has become a burden, as audiences are no longer able to assume that a new release will meet basic quality standards. While smaller studios like A24 and NEON have offered a diverse array of experimental genre exercises from new filmmakers, Blumhouse’s reliance on tried-and-true slasher, possession, and whodunit films has made it increasingly out-of-touch.
The biggest indication of Blumhouse’s fall was the underperformance of M3GAN 2.0, the sequel to one of the company’s biggest underdog hits. 2022’s M3GAN may have been a fairly routine blend of The Terminator and Child’s Play, but its PG-13 rating and acknowledgement of Internet terminology endeared it to teenagers, who’ve been the most loyal consumers of Blumhouse’s work. Although a sequel was inevitable, the three-year gap between installments was enough to turn M3GAN into “old news,” as its campy scares and self-aware humor no longer felt subversive. Despite its relatively modest budget, M3GAN 2.0 was such a financial failure that Blum attempted to apologize shortly after the weekend grosses were reported.
Blumhouse’s creative decisions indicate the company has been slow to pick up on industry trends. One of Blumhouse’s most significant achievements in the current decade was the overperformance of Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, which recontextualized the classic H.G. Wells novel as a prophetic warning about surveillance and gaslighting. The low-budget, modernized take on the classic story was an ideal fit for the source material, but 2025 showed the limit of this approach due to the creative and commercial failure of Whannell’s Wolf Man. Wolf Man lacked the human drama that made The Invisible Man so effective, as it was yet another heavy-handed metaphor for the inherent monster within men.
While Wolf Man may have simply been a misguided project from the beginning, it’s a major blow to Blumhouse, which has staked its future on a reboot of The Mummy. Many of these classic monster properties were rebooted poorly in the 2010s by other studios, as Universal Pictures’ quasi-epics Victor Frankenstein and Dracula Untold played like poor renditions of The Lord of the Rings. Blumhouse was smart to hijack this failed trend with something subversive like The Invisible Man, but it hasn’t captured the same hype as auteur-driven monster films like Robert Eggers’ brilliant modern interpretation of Nosferatu, which Focus Features turned into a surprise financial success last year. Wolf Man is yet another franchise that Blumhouse has made irrelevant, as the company has suffered diminished returns with the disappointing sequels to Halloween and The Exorcist.
The fluctuations in standards has also impeded Blumhouse’s ability to generate organic buzz for worthwhile projects, as 2025 also saw the release of Drop, a psychological thriller from reliable director Christopher Landon. Landon’s savvy work on the slasher satire Freaky and the time travel romp Happy Death Day showed his flexibility, but Drop attempted to revitalize a style of classical filmmaking that hasn't connected with millennials. Set within a high-rise Chicago restaurant, Drop is centered on the young widow Violet (Megann Fahy) as she’s threatened by an unseen spammer during her first date with the photographer Henry Campbell (Brandon Sklenar). While Drop creatively stretched its premise without a complete sacrifice of plausibility, it’s also a challenging film to market without the disclosure of critical twists. Even if Drop is one of the better Hitchcock rip-offs, it has less appeal when Psycho and Rear Window are easy to stream on Netflix.
It’s also possible that Blumhouse has taken the wrong lessons from its successes. Last year’s American version of Speak No Evil should’ve inspired the company to plunge deeper into sadistic black comedies, but Blum may have only seen its overperformance as a sign that audiences need more remakes of recent international hits. Similarly, Scott Derrickson’s supernatural thriller The Black Phone benefited from a conclusive, satisfying ending, which may as well be erased upon the release of its sequel later this year. Blumhouse could have a future as the distributor of mass-market schlock, but it now represents the establishment that it once rebelled against.