In an illuminating recent magazine profile, Fortune explained how Jason Blum, the low-budget horror movie impresario, has made a habit of outsmarting Hollywood. This weekend, he did it again.
In the Fortune piece, Blum told writer Devin Gordon that he was worried about whether The Exorcist: Believer—the biggest and riskiest bet that his Blumhouse Productions had ever made—would succeed. Blum’s fears were well-founded (more on that in a moment). But this weekend’s No. 1 movie, the relatively low-budget Five Night’s at Freddy’s, aka FNaF, will give Blum something to boast about as Halloween nears.
With his Exorcist film, Blum had more on the line than the $400 million deal that his partner, Universal Studios, struck to reboot William Friedkin’s terrifying 1973 movie. The weight of fans’ expectations weighed heavily on Blum, he told Gordon. Then there was the reputation risk: Blumhouse is famous for turning movies made for peanuts into franchises worth hundreds of millions (see: Paranormal Activity, Get Out, M3GAN). As Gordon explained: “This is a Blum bet that could actually go very wrong.”
“Blum admits he’s nervous,” Gordon wrote. “Test screenings were all over the place. ‘The weight of the title is daunting,’ he texted me a week after our lunch. ‘There is no version of a new Exorcist where I’d feel great.'”
And it turns out Blum was right to be concerned. His big swing at the iconic horror movie franchise fell short of expectations, with a $27 million opening weekend earlier this month and a critical consensus that director David Gordon Green’s film was “meh” at best.
But as Devin wrote in his profile, Blum was prepared for that possibility: “He’s not the guy who’s going to go check out that sound in the attic with only a rolled-up magazine in his hand.” The weapon Blum devised to protect himself from being haunted by a movie flop was another big movie release, this one much more in line with Blumhouse’s longtime strategy of making smart bets on cheap, zeitgeisty horror concepts. Five Nights at Freddy’s is based on a cult video game of the same name, and struck a chord for Gen Z and the millennials who grew up with it.
This weekend, FNaF (as it’s widely known) shattered a slew of box office records with a $130 million global opening, despite being released simultaneously to stream on Peacock. As Variety reports, it’s the biggest horror opening of the year so far (as well as the third-biggest horror movie opening ever); the highest-grossing Halloween weekend opener ever; and Blumhouse’s biggest opener to date. It’s also the second-biggest “hybrid” theater-and-streaming release of a film in any genre. And it was made for just over $20 million. “It’s so fun when it works,” Blum wrote on X.
As Gordon concluded in his profile of Blum: “The killer has struck again.”