Audio Essay - The End of the Blum Supremacy - State of Horror Films 2025

“If Blumhouse is in a slump, I’d like to tell that story. I don’t want other people to tell that story.”

Jason Blum, The Town, July 2025

In a baffling moment of industry transparency, Jason Blum called into The Town podcast on the morning after M3GAN 2.0’s disastrous opening weekend in late June to discuss what went wrong. Jason is the founder and leader of the highly successful Blumhouse Productions, a movie studio that quickly rose to success in the 2010s by producing low-budget horror films. Jason is notorious for being open about the normally clandestine aspects of the moviemaking business, but The Town episode was extraordinarily illuminating and revealing. At the same time, Jason Blum was there to spin like any typical Hollywood mogul.

M3GAN 2.0 opened to only 10 million dollars on its premiere weekend in late June 2025, which was under a third of what the original film opened to in 2023. The sequel will end up with a total of 39 million dollars at the box office versus the 181 million dollars of the original. Adding insult to injury, the production budget on the sequel was 25 million vs the original’s 15 million, and the marketing budget for part two was certainly much higher as well. In short, M3GAN 2.0 is a huge bomb.

Full Article: https://film-trace.beehiiv.com/p/the-end-of-the-blum-supremacy

Listen for more...