“We’re shooting a lot of unscripted already,” Blum says. “We’re beginning to shoot our lower budgeted stuff, both in film and TV. The beginning, the first quarter of next year is when we’re going to start our first larger budget thing.”
While Blumhouse is primarily best known for its horror films and TV shows, the company does indeed dabble in the unscripted arena (a revival of the early 2000s show Scare Tactics is among its recently announced titles) and has also produced Oscar-nominated dramatic fare like Whiplash and BlacKkKlansman.
But even though the company’s output, especially with its genre fare, has been prolific in recent years, Blum says that he does not expect the company to be back up to full speed in the near term.
“We’re definitely not up to where we were in 2019 at all,” he admits. “It just all depends on a vaccine. Put it this way, until there was a vaccine, I don’t think we’ll get the level of production that we had pre-COVID. I don’t think we’re going to return to that level until there’s a vaccine, but next year I anticipate we’ll make about maybe two-thirds as many movies as we were before. TV’s a little easier because it’s a little less expensive. TV hopefully will be similar to ’19, not ’20.”
As for Welcome to the Blumhouse, the first two of eight genre films acquired for that anthology premiere Tuesday (October 6) on Amazon Prime, with two more coming on October 13 and the rest scheduled for 2021. The Craft: Legacy premieres on the same service on October 28, and while the movie Freaky is slated to arrive theatrically in November, it’s a good bet that could shift to VOD depending on the circumstances.
