Before this past weekend, the story of Blumhouse‘s 2025 was box office struggle. The production company that made itself a name in horror with a string of low-budget successes, including Paranormal Activity, Insidious, and The Purge, had six movies dated for the year, and four in the first six months. None of those four really connected.

Wolf Man underperformed in January, failing to replicate the success that director Leigh Whannell had with his previous Universal Monsters remake, The Invisible Man. Both The Woman in the Yard (March) and Drop (April) were modestly budgeted, and the latter came in with hype out of its SXSW premiere, but neither performed particularly well.

M3GAN 2.0, perhaps the defining piece of this narrative, was positioned as a summer blockbuster with a prime, end-of-June release date. But despite being heavily marketed, its domestic debut dried up, opening to a third of what the first M3GAN made after weeks of tracking to at least equal it. While hardly a financial failure by the end of its run, it certainly didn’t deliver what the studio had hoped for.

That skid wasn’t destined to last, though – the two remaining releases, Black Phone 2 in October and Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 in December, were much easier bets. And, sure enough, Black Phone 2 delivered. Its $42 million global opening last weekend, with Halloween’s approach likely to help its legs, is already justifying its reported $30 million budget.

But this success has the potential to send the wrong message to Blumhouse – and they risk repeating a mistake that already hurt them this year.

Blumhouse Risks Repeating One Of The Mistakes That Killed M3GAN 2.0

Warning: light spoilers for Black Phone 2 belowIn the immediate wake of M3GAN 2.0‘s opening, Blumhouse’s founder and CEO, Jason Blum, went on The Town to break down what went wrong. It’s a fascinatingly open conversation (I recommend you give it a listen if you haven’t already), and it boils down the movie’s failure to the studio’s misconception of the character:

We all thought M3GAN was like Superman; we could do anything to her. We could change genres. We could put her in the summer. We could make her look different. We could turn her from a bad guy into a good guy. And we kind of classically overthought how powerful people’s engagement was, really, with her.

It’s an ᴀssessment that seems both honest and astute. From this misreading of the first film’s success came a cascade of decisions that, ultimately, turned audiences away from the sequel.

However, it’s interesting that Black Phone 2 bears some of the same hallmarks of franchise thinking. While it doesn’t swerve as dramatically away from the first movie, it takes the original’s supernatural twist on a pretty grounded serial killer story and blows it up to power a campy pseudo-slasher. In terms of tone and scope, it’s quite different from its predecessor.

And if M3GAN was Superman to Blumhouse, then the Grabber is clearly Freddy Krueger. The sequel’s characterization of the main villain is its most significant departure, with the creepy, warped humanity of Ethan Hawke’s first performance replaced with a force of pure malevolence and rage.

The result is pretty fun, and for at least the mystery-soaked first half, pretty scary. Both Black Phone 2‘s reviews and early box office returns suggest this film promised and delivered what the target audience was looking for.

But the Grabber is not Freddy Krueger.

For much of the first stretch of the film, it’s unclear exactly what is going on behind Gwen’s dreams, and the killings at Alpine Lake seem like their own story. The Grabber is clearly a presence, but it almost seems like crossed wires. Instead, as Hawke’s villain becomes more prominent, the movie takes step after step to make him the Blakes’ personal supervillain.

Black Phone 2 successfully makes the Grabber a fun, frightening villain in a way the character was not originally, but it also goes much further with the mythology than is necessary, and that chips away at the scares in the second half. The movie could’ve been better if there wasn’t this need to build up the next great slasher villain, the kind of character who could sustain a string of sequels.

The financial success has more to do with being one of October’s only big horror movies, with a marketing campaign that sold the supernatural scares well, than any gravitation around the Grabber. If Blumhouse tries to spin him into a series beyond this specific story, they could find themselves repeating the mistakes of M3GAN 2.0.

If anything, Black Phone 3 should lean into the children. As a plot device, Gwen’s psychic connections to yet-undiscovered murder victims has the same potential as The Conjuring movies giving Ed and Lorraine Warren a new case to solve in each installment. The Grabber is a better fit as a recurring presence in their lives, inserting himself into unrelated cases the way, say, Annabelle might, than an outright franchise anchor.