Blumhouse Boss on the Disappointments of Black Christmas, Happy Death Day 2U, and Ma

Blumhouse Productions looks like it has a good film on its hands with The Invisible Man, but some recent missteps still loom large. Jason Blum talked to Bloomberg about how he views the underperformance of some of their output recently. None of Black Christmas, Ma, or Happy Death Day 2U did as expected at the box office. But, for the boss, the experience provided some valuable lessons for how the studio has to move forward. This is still a relatively mid-tier outfit and those budgetary constraints have to be accounted for when they take on certain projects.

“You learn more from movies that don’t work than from movies that do. We learned our company is not built to rush,” Blum began. “You can’t do ‘no money’ and fast. You gotta do ‘no money’ and ‘no release date.’ To back into a release date with a low budget is a recipe for disaster.”

This will end up being important for the company moving forward as they become even more of a go-to for places looking to reformat horror properties. That’s more or less how The Invisible Man came about. The producer said he’d be willing to give a lot of the other Universal Monster movies a shot too.

“I would love to,” he offered. “I’ve had some version of this conversation. Not a serious one. I would say to Universal, ‘What monsters are available that I could play around with?’ I would send those things to our seven favorite filmmakers. But I’m not going to talk to Universal until The Invisible Man comes out.”

“It was like the Blumhouse version of The Invisible Man, it’s a lower-budget movie. It’s not dependent on special effects, CGI, stunts,” Blum told Collider. “It’s super character-driven, it’s really compelling, it’s thrilling, it’s edgy, it feels new. Those were all things that felt like they fit with what our company does. And it happened to be an Invisible Man story, so it checked both boxes. And we responded to it because I think Leigh is just an A+ director.”

“I don’t believe in saying ‘We’re going to do movies about this’ and then trying to find a movie about it,” the producer explained. “So I didn’t believe in going and saying, ‘I want to do all these movies’, and then try to find directors to do them. We have a director who… we’ve also done six or seven movies with, pitched us this spectacular idea about Invisible Man. We told him to write it, he wrote it, then we took it to the studio and said, ‘We’d love to do this and this is what we would do with it,’ and they said yes.”

The Invisible Man stalks into theaters Friday.