It’s been a great month for the new Halloween movie, which means good news for the studio behind it, with David Gordon Green’s latest release helping to push Blumhouse Productions’ total global gross in these last nine years past the $4 billion mark. And for a studio that specializes in relatively low-budget, financially low-stakes works, this milestone is a pretty clear sign that their model is still working.
Blumhouse set the trend for its horror-heavy output with its first wide release, 2009’s Paranormal Activity, which managed to rake in $200 million worldwide on a budget of just $15,000. Since then, the found-footage flick has grown to be one of several highly profitable franchise’s that the studio helped create, with the Insidious and Sinister movies following in its wake.
Things have only gotten better for the studio in recent years, too. 2017, for instance, gave Blumhouse its two highest-grossing movies to date in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and Jordan Peele’s Get Out, with Halloween currently sitting at third place. But while horror has generally proven to be Blumhouse’s bread and butter, some of its most acclaimed offerings have been from outside the genre, including 2014’s Oscar-winning Whiplash and this year’s BlackKklansman.
Of course, the studio’s approach of bringing out cheap works and seeing what lands with the public hasn’t always yielded the best results, in terms of both artistic merit and commercial success. 2015’s critically panned Jem and the Holograms, for instance, was pulled early from theaters by distributor Universal due to its dismal box office performance.
But overall, Blumhouse Productions looks to be on an upward trajectory, with highly anticipated works like Split sequel Glass and Peele’s Us on their way next year. And with a sequel looking all but inevitable for Halloween, it seems like Jason Blum still believes that this current horror boom has some life in it yet.