A number of staff have been laid off at Blumhouse Productions, the indie horror studio behind June’s M3GAN 2.0.
As part of a wider company restructuring effort, indie horror studio Blumhouse Productions has laid off six members of staff across its various departments. According to industry sources reported by Deadline and TheWrap, those affected are “largely junior-level executives and support staff,” including Haley Pigman – a creative development manager who worked on The Woman In The Yard, released earlier this year.
In total, Blumhouse employs around 100 people.
The layoffs reports emerge in the middle of a tricky year for the studio. Its slate of films for 2025, which has also included Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man and Christopher Landon’s Drop, have more than made their budgets back, but failed to take off in the same way as Blumhouse’s hits from previous years.
The studio was bullish about the prospects of its sci-fi action comedy sequel, M3GAN 2.0, but it too floundered in cinemas, with a take of around $36m against an estimated budget of between $15m and $25m.
In the wake of that film’s release in late June, producer and studio co-founder Jason Blum made a surprise appearance on The Town podcast, where he talked candidly about the M3GAN sequel’s disappointing box office and where the studio goes from here.
“I don’t think the market can absorb this much horror,” he said, referring to a year which has seen the release of genre hits like Sinners and Final Destination: Bloodlines – both films with larger budgets than the typical Blumhouse release.
From 2007, when Paranormal Activity made Blumhouse into a genre filmmaking juggernaut, the studio maintained a simple yet effective strategy: keep budgets low, invest in tested yet affordable directors, and ensure the scripts are compact and genre-focused. It’s an approach that resulted in such hits as Get Out, The Purge, Split, M3GAN and too many others to list. And while not all of its movies were successes, they were more than outweighed by those that were. (There were also smaller offerings that generated profits on streaming services.)
More recent years have seen the budgets creep up, however, and the box office takings from all but its biggest hits dwindle. Blumhouse’s biggest hit of the past few years by far was Five Nights At Freddy’s, a horror romp that has a built-in audience who played the videogames on which it’s based.
In response, Blum has said that the company’s future strategy will involve more sequels and bigger budgets – a very different approach from the Blumhouse that made, say, the $4.5m non-franchise horror, Get Out.
“I do think we need to up the budgets,” Blum said. “I think people need theatrical events. Black Phone 2 is a theatrical event. Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 is a theatrical event.”
Those films are Blumhouse’s final offerings for 2025 – Scott Derrickson’s The Black Phone 2 due out in October, while Emma Tammi’s Freddy’s 2 follows in December. As hinted at by those layoffs, they’ll close out a turbulent period for a once rock-solid studio.
“There’s clearly a huge audience that wants to go to the movies,” Blum said in June. “We just can’t figure out what movies they want to go and see.”
