A little bit of a bad news, good news situation today, horror fans. The bad news is that Blumhouse’s upcoming Wolf Man movie has been delayed to 2025. The good news is that the studio is not rushing director Leigh Whannell to simply meet a release date. It also means that we get to kick off next year with a big studio horror movie, which is always a good way to kick off a year.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Universal Pictures had done some shuffling with the release calendar and has bumped Wolf Man from its previous October 15, 2024, date. Instead, the movie will arrive on January 17, 2025, meaning it is being pushed back by three months. But that’s time that Whannell can make good use of in post-production to make sure the film is in tip-top shape. Plot details for this reimagining of the Universal Monsters classic are being kept under wraps, but it’s said to involve “a man whose family is stalked by a dangerous predator.”
Christopher Abbott (Poor Things) leads the cast of the film. He replaced Ryan Gosling (Barbie), who had long been attached to the project. Julia Garner (Ozark) co-stars alongside Abbott. Gosling remains on board as an executive producer alongside Whannell, Ken Kao, Bea Sequeira and Mel Turner. Whannell, whose previous films include Insidious: Chapter 3 and Upgrade, also penned the screenplay for the film.
For Blumhouse and Universal, the move is a logical one. While it would make an awful lot of sense to have a movie like this in theaters in time for Halloween, that can be a competitive time of year. On the other hand, January is often a dead zone, paving the way for a sleeper hit. Case in point, last year’s M3GAN opened in January and ended up making $180 million worldwide, becoming one of the biggest original movies of any kind since the pandemic began. A sequel is hitting theaters in 2025. In theory, Wolf Man could similarly benefit.
Whannell has proven that he can deliver the goods in this arena as well. He previously directed a reimagining of The Invisible Man. Released in 2020 with a small budget of just $7 million, it pulled in $144 million worldwide even though its theatrical run was cut short by Covid. Universal and Blumhouse have since embraced this filmmaker-driven approach to the Universal Monsters, as opposed to facing big-budget disasters like 2010’s The Wolfman.
Look for Wolf Man in theaters on January 17, 2025.
