Today, Blumhouse Productions is a powerhouse name in the world of horror cinema. Projects ranging from Get Out to M3GAN to The Purge and most recently, Blumhouse’s Five Nights At Freddy’s have established a reputation for the niche studio. But not every big movie studio starts off firing on all cylinders. In fact, back in February 2014, The Hollywood Reporter ran a piece criticizing Blumhouse Productions as a “crowded movie morgue,” with many features financed by the studio failing to get released.
At the time, the outlet proposed that producer Jason Blum’s micro-budget movie approach wouldn’t work out in the long term. What happened in the last ten years? What led to Blumhouse transforming from a “movie morgue” to a company associated with the biggest horror titles in the modern world?
The most striking element about that vintage Hollywood Reporter piece is the Blumhouse titles referenced here. A key aspect reflecting the negative perception of Blumhouse in this era was the comedy/thriller Stretch suddenly getting pulled from its March 2014 theatrical release date. This title was a Hollywood satire, with plenty of big names (like Ed Helms and Chris Pine) in its cast, a far cry from the lesser-known performers of popular modern Blumhouse productions.
Though not mentioned in the piece, other early Blumhouse titles that barely got released included comedies like The Babymakers and Best Night Ever. Meanwhile, a month after this article was published, Blumhouse would embark on co-financing Jem and the Holograms, a family-friendly musical drama adaptation of the 1980s animated TV series of the same name.
In the modern world, Blumhouse has almost exclusively shifted to financing horror and thriller movies. Those genres have always been a heavy focus for Blumhouse, but they weren’t originally its sole domain. In fact, Blumhouse’s early years saw it getting attached to a bevy of projects across a wide variety of tones, with the outfit being connected to material like the faith-based drama The Resurrection of Gavin Stone as late as January 2017.
Many of these productions, like Stretch, just weren’t as economically sensible for modern theatrical releases as low-budget horror films. Inevitably, they got left on the shelf once Blumhouse couldn’t find distribution for such titles. Blumhouse has since minimized the chances for negative publicity tied to a shelved movie by simply focusing all its efforts on palatable horror movies.
This Hollywood Reporter essay is also interesting in hindsight for debuting at the start of 2014, a year that would prove formative for Blumhouse. Not only did The Purge: Anarchy become a big hit and solidify The Purge as a big franchise for the label, but Whiplash premiered in October 2014 and became the studio’s first Best Picture nominee.
Just as doubt began to understandably bubble surrounding the long-term viability of Blumhouse, this company managed to launch both a franchise and an award-season darling in the span of a few months. Those kinds of accomplishments helped Blumhouse shake off the “movie morgue” allegations.
There’s also an undeniably cynical nature to why Blumhouse Productions has preserved its image as a source of reputable genre movies in recent years. Back in 2015, Blumhouse had its name attached to eleven different movies that played in wide theatrical releases. In 2023, Blumhouse only had its name on four different wide theatrical releases.
It still put out a ton of movies in 2023, with the majority going straight to Amazon streaming, MGM+, or Peacock. Not only are many Blumhouse titles sent straight to quiet streaming releases, but they also star largely unknown actors (such as festival acquisitions like Soft & Quiet), unlike earlier Blumhouse DTV efforts that starred Topher Grace, Lee Pace, or Chris Pine.
There was a lot of media attention when those star-studded projects went immediately to PVOD or physical media, which generated negative publicity for the Blumhouse name. In the modern world, Blumhouse doesn’t exclusively make masterpieces, however, the studio has become more conscious of how to send movies to home media.
In other words, Blumhouse still makes lots of stuff. Sending many of those directly to streaming means those projects rarely generate the kind of negative publicity as the studio’s earlier long-delayed projects like Delerium or The Keeping Hours. Rather than keeping so many movies on a shelf for years, Blumhouse cranks out MGM+ or Amazon original movies.
Above all else, though, Blumhouse Productions was saved from the “movie morgue” label thanks to the mid-2010s horror movie renaissance that still reverberates through culture today. Between 2013 and 2015, the triple-genre-whammy of non-Blumhouse titles The Conjuring, The Babadook, and It Follows contributed to a revitalization of modern horror.
Blumhouse, which had already been producing scary movies (albeit many of them in the found-footage mold emulating the 2009 hit Paranormal Activity), was perfectly positioned to ride this wave of the genre’s resurgence.
It took bigger major studios like Paramount Pictures a few years to get a steady pipeline of horror movies rolling. Blumhouse, meanwhile, was raring to go right away simply because moviegoers’ tastes intersected with the kinds of movies the studio was already enamored with. Low-budget 2017 titles like Split and Get Out continued the renaissance for modern horror movies and helped solidify the Blumhouse brand as one audiences could trust in an increasingly crowded marketplace for frightening features.
In the landscape of 2014 (a year where only one new horror grossed over $51 million domestically), Blumhouse probably did seem like a cinematic morgue. Within a few years, though, the boom of horror movies gave Blumhouse a chance to significantly redefine itself. And redefine itself it did. Blumhouse Productions not only quickly became home to a slew of hit titles but has also been a formula that Hollywood rivals have struggled to mimic. Outfits like Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. haven’t been able to produce a stream of low-budget horror films as steady as Blumhouse.
Granted, part of that evolution away from “movie morgue” has also meant an embrace of franchise titles and pre-existing IP. That has disappointingly left little room on Blumhouse’s modern slate for original titles like BlacKkKlansman and Get Out, which defined its earliest days and solidified the studio’s reputation for the better.
The studio may have been labeled a “movie morgue” back in 2014, but in 2024, Blumhouse’s FNAF became their highest-grossing release worldwide, breaking multiple records. And that was no blip, considering it became the 19th Blumhouse movie to be number one at the domestic box office. So ten years later, who’s really having the last laugh?
