Jason Blum gets it right a lot of the time. The Blumhouse CEO is responsible for producing some of the most iconic horror franchises, like The Purge, Halloween, and Paranormal Activity among others. While the studio has become synonymous with horror films, the producer has his hands in other ventures as well, like Whiplash, Blackkklansman, and Kicking and Screaming. While the master-producer may seem to have a finger on the pulse of mass entertainment, he’s had some misses as well, and is now opening up about some failures that still haunt him.
In an interview with Variety, the studio head honcho talked about what has made Blumhouse so profitable and made people so excited for upcoming Blumhouse flicks. While theatrical releases have been unpredictable for many studios, Blumhouse’s low-budget horror flicks continue to attract an audience. Even with successes, Jason Blum continues to think about some the misses, including two glaring ones. He said:
The two biggest failures that sting, that I think about every day, are Jem and the Holograms and The Hunt. Those should’ve been hit movies. The great, exciting and horrible thing about the movie business is you can get everything right and still things don’t work.
That’s a harsh reality of this business, tha’s for sure. And while addressing that, Blum went into detail about what exactly happened with these two movies, explaining:
I think Jon M. Chu got everything right on Jem and the Holograms, and it didn’t work. And The Hunt got everything right, but fake news killed the movie. It broke my heart, because there was a false narrative that got attached to the movie that destroyed it. It was too bad, and it would’ve been a huge hit and have been great for the culture.
Jem and the Holograms had a lot going for it. It was the inspiring story about a talented shy teenager who forms a girl group with some of her friends that slowly rises to success. It was written and directed by Jon M. Chu, who was coming off the success of a handful of music-based films, and was also produced by music business titans like Scooter Braun.
However, Jem and the Holograms ended up being a financial failure and was panned by critics. It performed so terribly that the movie started being pulled from theaters. Even with the talent behind it, it never seemed to rise above a mediocre storyline, and the lack of star power involved likely prevented the film from being a commercial success. While it felt like it’d work on paper, it didn’t work in theaters, which still haunts Blum.
The Hunt, however, felt like a more circumstantial failure. The film followed a group of wealthy elites who kidnap lower-class individuals to hunt them for sport. It was deliberately a political film, and meant to be a satire.
The movie was originally set for a 2019 release, but the studio decided to delay The Hunt to March 2020 as the release date corresponded with mass shootings in America and the timing would’ve been in poor taste. When it was eventually released, it was during the height of the pandemic, when movie theaters were struggling and political tensions were high. As a result, the film flew under the radar and failed at the box office.
In the sea of so many successes for Blum, these two films seem to still be a sore spot for the producer. They clearly are outliers, and not representative at all of Blum’s talent for selecting great projects that are commercially successful and producing prowess.
This goes to show that even the most accomplished individuals can still get it wrong sometimes, and it’s most understandably frustrating when these losses are out of creative control of the team involved. Even if these misses personally haunt Blum, they haven’t hurt his reputation, as he continues to be one of the most in-demand and successful movie producers of the modern era.
You can revisit The Hunt for yourself now, as the film is currently streaming with a Peacock subscription. You can also check out Jem and the Holograms, which is available to rent on Amazon. Additionally, horror fans can look forward to Jason Blum’s upcoming horror movie producing feat, The Black Phone 2, which hits theaters on October 17th, 2025.