Does no one want to watch people get butchered any more? Horror, long recognised as one of Hollywood’s most reliable cash cows, is in a panic: few scary movies are breaking through financially in 2025, many more are cratering completely, and questions are being asked about the future of a genre that once seemed as durable as Jason Voorhees. Forget the death of the archetypal movie star: if sassy psycho-cyborg M3GAN can’t open a movie, who can?
Back in 2022, the first M3GAN – about an artificially intelligent doll with a bloodthirst – grossed $182m (£135m), including $78m of pure profit for its backers at Universal Pictures and the micro-budget horror studio Blumhouse, off a production budget of just $12m. Thanks to smart marketing, which turned its leading lady’s incongruous dancefloor skills into a spooky meme, M3GAN ended up exemplifying the dream outcome of the modern studio horror film: low-cost, big-brain thrills with such inescapable dazzle that audiences couldn’t not seek it out. Why, then, did last month’s M3GAN 2.0 go so badly? In four weeks, the more action-oriented sequel has grossed a measly $38m worldwide, a result so mortifying that the head of Blumhouse put his hands up within days of its release and admitted to having totally missed the mark.
M3GAN 2.0 isn’t alone, either. This year has seen a staggering number of horror films die at the box office, among them Blumhouse’s reboot of Wolf Man ($34m gross on a production budget of $20m), the Ayo Edebiri horror comedy Opus ($2m gross/$10m budget), Jenna Ortega vehicle Death of a Unicorn ($16m gross/$15m budget), the well-received adoption chiller Bring Her Back ($23m gross/$15m budget), and last week’s revival of the Nineties hit I Know What You Did Last Summer, which opened to a flat $13m in the US. Yes, these films’ production budgets are lean (though the extent of marketing budgets is largely kept under lock and key), and many of the above titles will ultimately break even once video-on-demand grosses are factored in – but none of their respective backers will be happy with what amounts to loose change.
On the other end of the spectrum, meanwhile, are this year’s handful of out-and-out horror smashes, most significantly the Michael B Jordan vampire film Sinners, which cost a reported $100m to make but has grossed $365m. There’s also been Final Destination: Bloodlines ($285m and counting on a budget of $50m) and Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, which has so far grossed $145m on a budget of $60m – not wildly profitable, by any means, but decent enough. So people are still going to see horror on the big screen, but – echoing the Western world as a whole – horror’s middle class is evaporating. The genre seems to either go big or collapse entirely. Any kind of financial in-between is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
All this leaves a film such as next week’s Weapons carrying undue levels of pressure. A missing-persons thriller starring Julia Garner and Josh Brolin, it revolves around the disappearance of a class of children in small-town USA, and serves as filmmaker Zach Cregger’s follow-up to his 2022 sleeper hit Barbarian. Promotion for the film has been strong – lots of abstract and eerie imagery in trailers, and attempts at virality via the publishing of two hours of “surveillance footage” from the night of the children’s “disappearance”. But the stakes feel particularly high. Weapons sparked a bidding war between rival studios when Cregger first unveiled his script, with Warner Bros so eager to get the up-and-comer on side that they coughed up a $38m budget for the film, and allowed him final cut. If Weapons underperforms, this kind of investment in a young, ambitious filmmaker’s original ideas may become even rarer than it is already.
Why this is bad for everyone is that, in the last decade or so, horror has been one of the few genres to wholeheartedly embrace fresh ideas and fresh voices. The likes of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) and Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015) proved that audiences will turn out in droves for intriguing new concepts, no matter how wild they might seem on paper – and in the process, an entire generation of buzzy new filmmakers developed fanbases, industry clout, and (relative) name recognition.
Speaking to The Town podcast shortly after M3GAN 2.0 bombed, Blumhouse head Jason Blum suggested that there is simply too much horror being released for many films to break through, and that the cheap-to-produce movies that were Blumhouse’s bread and butter (their biggest hits have included Get Out, Us, The Invisible Man and the Purge franchise) no longer cut it. “We need to up the budgets,” he insisted. “People need theatrical events.”
Which is, I suppose, accurate. This year’s most successful horror films had heavy promotional spends behind them, while even the most financially lucrative horrors of 2024 – meaning the low-cost, high-return likes of The Substance and Oz Perkins’s Silence of the Lambs pastiche Longlegs – were transformed into must-see “events” via relentless and effective marketing.
But just as important is the actual quality of material on offer, with far too many modern horror movies settling for tedious mining of intellectual property and repetitive premises (Knives Out and Midsommar have created an unfortunate cottage industry of star-studded, eat-the-rich, religious-cult disappointments). Blumhouse have been particularly guilty of this over the last 18 months, tossing out a raft of movies that felt as if they were formed backwards from an already unimpressive elevator pitch: Night Swim (haunted pool!); AfrAId (haunted Alexa device!); House of Spoils (Ariana DeBose!).
Things may, however, be looking up. As much as it pains me to slander a film that made smart use of Nineties stalwarts Freddie Prinze Jr and Jennifer Love Hewitt, it is something of a relief that I Know What You Did Last Summer couldn’t get people in cinema seats last week. A largely serviceable but poorly directed slasher pastiche, the film may have lifted the story beats and faces from the 1997 original, but it failed at the things that truly matter: character development, suspense, memorable chase sequences. It seemed to prove that, when it comes to horror, box-office success in 2025 requires far more than just dusting off some old IP and hoping for the best.
Hollywood does have a knack for taking all the wrong lessons from its success stories. (Just look at how Barbie’s gargantuan box office has led to the development of loads of other movies about toys.) But wouldn’t it be lovely if the triumph of Sinners sparked an influx of expensive, original horror movies moving forward – and not, well, Sinners 2.
‘Weapons’ is released 8 August
