HOUSE OF HORRORS

conventional wisdom would say that Hollywood’s most successful production outfit over the last decade has been, hands down, Marvel Studios. After all, the MCU is the ultimate box-office behemoth, boasting four of the 10 highest-grossing movies of all time. But there may be another contender for the crown…

Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions generally spends significantly less on an entire movie than Marvel would pay Robert Downey Jr. for donning the Iron Man armour, but their returns are huge. Since Paranormal Activity earned nearly $200 million on a miniscule $15,000 budget, Blumhouse has repeatedly turned movies that cost $5-10 million (tiny by Hollywood standards) into box-office hits.

“Our business is really a combination of independent filmmaking and studio marketing,” Blum tells  when we sit down to chat. “The eureka moment for me came when I thought, ‘Wow, I can have my cake and eat it too if we make scary movies independently and then have studio marketing behind them. (2009) is where all of that coalesced, (2013) was really the movie that felt like it wasn’t just a magic trick and we weren’t just getting lucky, that we actually had a different kind of system that worked.”