Blum and Wan Say Horror's New Wave Is Saving the Whole Industry

The Blumhouse and Atomic Monster chiefs sat down at a PGA panel to declare the genre in its best shape in decades — and sketched out what a combined future might look like.

Jason Blum and James Wan spoke at a Producers Guild of America panel about the current state of horror.
Blum compared the moment to the 1970s, citing a new generation of young filmmakers making edgy films that are connecting with theatrical audiences.
Recent hits including Obsession and The Backrooms were cited as evidence of the genre's commercial pull.
Both producers floated the idea of a Blumhouse–Atomic Monster alliance functioning as a kind of Disney of Horror.
The panel comes as the wider studio system continues to wrestle with declining theatrical attendance across non-franchise titles.

The room was full of producers, but the two men everyone wanted to hear from were the ones who have spent twenty years proving that cheap and scary can also mean profitable. Jason Blum and James Wan took their seats at a Producers Guild of America panel recently, and what followed was less a postmortem on the genre than a victory lap with footnotes.

Blum, whose Blumhouse Productions has turned a low-overhead model into something close to a genre institution, told the panel there is “almost this feeling of the ‘70s, of a new generation of young people making edgy movies that are connecting in theaters in a crazy way.” It is a comparison that flatters everyone in the room and is not entirely wrong. Films arriving outside the superhero-sequel pipeline have been finding audiences that the conventional studio math said were not there.

Wan, whose Atomic Monster banner produced the Conjuring universe and has continued to back original horror properties, echoed the sentiment. Both men pointed to recent titles — Obsession and The Backrooms among them — as the kind of theatrical wins the industry needs as it tries to pull general audiences back from their sofas and their streaming queues.

The more forward-looking item was the pair's discussion of a potential Blumhouse–Atomic Monster partnership operating at a scale they described as a Disney of Horror. The phrase is the kind of thing that sounds like hyperbole in a panel room and like a term sheet six months later. Neither man laid out a timeline, but neither walked it back either.

The wider context is hard to ignore. Studios have spent three years renegotiating what counts as a theatrical event. Horror, with its low production costs and its reliable opening-weekend spikes, has consistently outperformed the math. Blum and Wan are not predicting a revolution so much as describing one that is already mid-scroll.