For a decade and a half, Blumhouse has been the industry standard for consistent horror success at the box office, yielding high concept, low-budget hits every year and spawning multiple franchises in the process.
But for the past 18 months, the studio has suffered its first extended slump, and the sequel that was supposed to get things back on track, “M3GAN 2.0,” has instead suffered a poor $10.2 million domestic/$17.1 million global opening weekend.
“I look at this opening weekend, and it’s hard to think of a more disappointing or shocking launch this year,” said Boxoffice’s SVP of content strategy Daniel Loria. “There have been bigger bombs like ‘Snow White,’ but we knew that film had problems. Even if a lower opening than the first ‘M3GAN’ was expected, because tracking was at $18-20 million, I don’t think anyone was expecting a start that’s lower than ‘Night Swim.’”
The tepid run of the $25 million sequel is another example of how even the most successful production companies of the last decade are facing challenges in the last several years, as changes to audience tastes and viewing habits have made it difficult find consistent theatrical success, even with a sequel to a massive hit carried by a wave of memes and social media activity.
When it hit theaters two years ago, “M3GAN” was the embodiment of what made Blumhouse one of Universal’s most successful first-look deal partners. Directed by Gerard Johnstone on a $12 million budget, “M3GAN” took the killer doll horror trope made popular by the “Child’s Play” series and gave it a sassy high-tech twist that younger moviegoers turned into a viral hit with the now infamous “M3GAN dance” as it grossed $95 million domestic and $181.7 million worldwide.
But with this sequel that moved away from horror and more towards action and comedy – Slant’s Justin Clark describes it as “John Waters at the helm of a ‘Terminator 2’ remake” – “M3GAN 2.0” has earned an opening weekend that is just a third of the $30.4 million domestic opening of its predecessor.
Blumhouse and Universal declined to comment for this story, but Blumhouse CEO and founder Jason Blum shared some candid thoughts on Tuesday’s episode of “The Town.” While he said that his team needs more time for a full post-mortem of the sequel’s performance, his initial impression is that the audience wasn’t as open to “M3GAN” going from horror to action as he thought.
“We all thought M3GAN was like Superman. We could do anything to her. We could change genres. We could put her in the summer […] We could turn her from a bad guy to a good guy,” Blum said. “We kind of classically overthought how powerful people’s engagement was with her.”
Its weak opening suggests the film will likely be the eighth-straight Blumhouse theatrical title going back to the start of 2024 to gross less than $80 million worldwide. The highest grossing of those eight films is James Watkins’ remake of the Danish horror film “Speak No Evil” with $77.2 million, with other recent misfires including “Wolf Man” ($35.1 million) and “The Woman in the Yard” ($23.3 million).
In fact, 2024 was the first year since Blumhouse launched in earnest with “Paranormal Activity” in 2009 that the studio has failed to release a film that grossed at least $100 million globally.
Granted, in some of those years, it was sequels from established franchises like “Halloween,” “The Purge” and “Insidious” that yielded those nine-digit hits; Blumhouse didn’t have such a franchise on its 2024 slate. It’s also worth noting that with a $25 million budget, “M3GAN 2.0” carried the largest price tag of any of these recent underperformers, so it would be a bit too far to call these movies flops.
But consider where Blumhouse was in 2017, when M. Night Shyamalan’s “Split” – a stealth spinoff of his 2000 film “Unbreakable” – and Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning “Get Out” gave the studio its first and only year with two $200 million-plus global grossers at a combined production budget of just $14 million. Even recently, Blumhouse found success in 2022 with an adaptation of the short story “The Black Phone” that grossed $161 million, and in 2023 it set a studio record with the Gen Z-driven “Five Nights at Freddy’s” which made $297.4 million.
“The movies weren’t the same, but you could count on Universal getting at least one hit out of Blumhouse every year,” Loria said.
There have been past instances of genre-shifting Blumhouse sequels that didn’t work out. One such film was “Happy Death Day 2U,” the sequel to a “Groundhog Day”-esque slasher film that, like “M3GAN 2.0,” leaned more into comedy and absurdity than its predecessor. While the first “Death Day” made $125 million worldwide, the sequel made just $64 million.
In spite of the numbers, “M3GAN 2.0” is actually earning slightly higher audience scores than its predecessor. The first “M3GAN” earned a B on CinemaScore and has a Rotten Tomatoes audience score of 78%. The sequel brought in a B+ CinemaScore, and its early RT score stands at 84%, though critics are more mixed at 59%.
While some of Blumhouse’s recent films like “Wolf Man” were poorly received, others like “Drop” have earned strong marks yet still haven’t been able to find widespread traction. Boxoffice’s Loria sees similarities to the struggles that Pixar and Marvel Studios have been facing with recent duds like “Captain America: Brave New World” and “Elio” in that audiences are no longer instantly sold on whatever those studios are selling just because they see the company logo at the start of the trailer.
“We’re really in an age where brand name alone doesn’t sell a film. People don’t instantly say yes to just any Pixar or Marvel film anymore,” he said. “This might just be a growing pain period that every studio is going to have to go through.”
The silver lining is that because Blumhouse keeps its costs low, it may just take one big hit to right the ship. “The Black Phone 2,” which will be Blumhouse’s Halloween offering this year, hews closer to its predecessor’s tone than “M3GAN 2.0” did. And with a lack of wide release horror competition that month, anyone looking for seasonal frights at the theater will turn to that sequel provided the word-of-mouth is strong.
Then there’s “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2,” the sequel to Blumhouse’s highest grossing film ever, which hits theaters during the customarily dead period for theaters in early December. It’s a good spot because “FNAF,” while very frontloaded, earned an $80 million opening weekend two years ago.
As the “Sonic the Hedgehog” films have shown, video game films can enjoy a reliable base of hardcore fans no matter what time of the year a film adaptation is released, so “FNAF 2” is likely to get at least one weekend of excellent play that should break Blumhouse’s losing streak if “Black Phone 2” can’t.
But in 2026 and beyond, Blumhouse will have to figure out how to get moviegoers to come back in a horror landscape where hits can always be found — just look at Warner Bros.’ success with “Sinners” and “Final Destination: Bloodlines” — but audience tastes are never easy to nail down. The next non-franchise film on its list comes next May with “Incidents Around the House,” an adaptation of the 2024 paranormal horror novel from “Bird Box” author Josh Malerman starring Jessica Chastain and Jay Duplass.
Meanwhile, Blumhouse will try other franchise ventures, as it has acquired the rights to the long-running “Saw” franchise after it was successfully revived with Lionsgate’s “Saw X” in 2023. James Wan, who is now part of Blumhouse’s core creative team after his production company Atomic Monster merged with BH, will take creative control of the franchise he started with Leigh Whannell back in 2004.
And then there’s “The Exorcist,” the hallowed franchise which Blumhouse reportedly paid hundreds of millions to acquire the rights to. Its first attempt, “The Exorcist: Believer,” failed to launch a new rebooted trilogy. Universal and Blumhouse will try again with a different “Exorcist” reboot to be directed by Mike Flanagan, though a release date has not been set and Flanagan is currently occupied making Prime Video’s “Carrie” series.
On “The Town,” Blum said that Blumhouse is looking into pivoting away from their low-budget strategy on some future productions, noting that “Final Destination: Bloodlines” had a reported $50 million budget and was able to successfully sell itself as a theatrical event, which he sees as the key goal for every studio in a post-COVID theatrical landscape and what they are aiming with on their upcoming titles.
“One of the big responsibilities we have to our filmmakers is to communicate to them what is working now,” he said. “And what is working now is very different than what used to work for Blumhouse.”
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