Blumhouse Productions: A (Somewhat) Independent Movie Studio

Image found on deadline.com

Image found on deadline.com

Gage Landauer, Feature Editor

Blumhouse as a production studio proves that you don’t need to sell out to be successful and deserve the respect they get. C.E.O of Blumhouse, Jason Blum, says that they prioritize telling stories over anything else. And for the most part that seems to be true, though some of their movies aren’t great, the freedom this studio gives their directors is commendable and makes up for their faults. 

 

Blumhouse Productions has a simple but effective strategy to make movies: make it cheap and market It to everyone. This has led to Blumhouse making 7 to 10 movies a year, which usually performs fairly well at the box office. This model began in 2009 when they released Paranormal Activity, which was made with a budget of $15000 and went on to make $193 million worldwide. With such small budgets, most of these movies can be considered indie productions. Blumhouse primarily focuses on horror movies and marketing to horror audiences. It’s often easy to advertise horror movies because most people are in it just for the thrill. 

 

Blumhouse casts their net wide and consistently reals in more money every time they take these risks. Though they make a lot of money they don’t always produce great films; but when they make something good, It’s really good. What sets them apart from B movie studios is that they give their staff lots of creative freedom. Directors that work for Blumhouse can expect to see their visions come to fruition. 

 

With this business model, Blumhouse has only improved over time. Blumhouse Productions has released some of the best horror movies of the last decade. Blumhouse has worked with big names such as M. Night Shamlan and director Jordan Peele. Jordan Peele made the film Get Out that won him the award for best-adapted screenplay while working for Blumhouse.

With streaming becoming a very large part of the film industry Bumhouse decided to begin releasing t.v. shows. They released the anthology series Into the Dark in 2018 on Hulu to mild praise. Blumhouse usually focuses on horror but they began working on other genres so they could market to multiple audiences; one such project was The Loudest Voice a Showtime limited series about the sexual harassment charges that lead to Roger Alies leaving the Fox Network. Blumhouse also hopes to break into the book and comic book industry by allowing its directors and writers to publish written stories under the Blumhouse name.