The CFO of horror

It’s been a frighteningly good year for Blumhouse Atomic Monster, the film production company behind horror franchises such as Insidious and The Black Phone. It also brought theatergoers the summer horror hits Obsession and Backrooms, which led the way toward Blumhouse’s 2026 slate of movies surpassing $1 billion in box office revenue by August.

For Blumhouse Atomic Monster brass like CFO Josh Small, though, the real horror show would be if corporate suits mandated results and held creators to firm metrics.

Blumhouse’s successful script includes regular strategic planning to help ensure it hits earning targets, Small told CFO Brew. However, the growth goals do not drive moviemaking. The company’s leaders instead focus on creating the conditions for moviemaking magic to happen.

“A lot of what we do as planning professionals, or finance professionals, or strategy professionals, is about…setting the groundwork, making sure the soil is as best as it can be for the right things to happen,” Small said.

Film production, like other creative industries, isn’t about producing widgets en masse (a horror movie factory would be an OSHA nightmare, anyway). That’s not to say Blumhouse doesn’t measure performance or track progress, he clarified. Rather, it relies more on qualitative, “soft” measurements.

“These are soft KPIs; they’re not hard, financial KPIs,” Small said. “Ultimately, what you see, though, is that if [we’re] successful in the soft KPIs, the larger strategy KPIs that we have—about where we want to get with earnings and growing the company—that’s the only way to get there. [It’s] like we had conviction that setting these conditions the right way is the way we get to where we want to be. But it’s not a linear line of ‘do this, this, and this,’ and you get there.”

Ghoulish garden. Blumhouse executives used this light-touch approach following its 2024 merger with Atomic Monster, Small said. Blumhouse founder Jason Blum and Atomic Monster founder James Wan (who blessed us with the Saw franchise) told the New York Times in 2022 that they complement each other with their respective strengths: Blum’s business acumen and Wan’s creative mind.

Blum also told the Times he wanted to boost movie releases from three or four a year to at least eight. Blumhouse Atomic Monster has released a combined 10 films in 2026, including seven theatrical releases and three that went straight to digital. It also produced five TV series.

Blum “had a vision of how he wanted [the combined company] to be implemented and integrated,” but he wanted to keep both creative cultures intact, Small said.

“We didn’t want to impose creative KPIs that work for Blumhouse on Atomic Monster or vice versa,” Small said. “They need to be [in] their own gardens that grow.”

There was change, though. Blumhouse folded the smaller Atomic Monster into some of its business processes, Small said. Wanting to ease folks into a new structure rather than forcing one onto them, Blumhouse held “buy-in integration meetings” rather than “push-down” meetings, as Small described, wherein it could “ease [Atomic Monster] into some of the financial and planning processes.”

Small-budget successes. Success in filmmaking is nowhere as simple as snapping a One Wish Willow (we don’t recommend CFOs try that method), but it helps when the bar for success is much lower than, say, a blockbuster made for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Horror films tend to be made relatively cheaply, which means it doesn’t take much to recoup an investment. For instance, Obsession cost just $750,000 to produce. Per Box Office Mojo, the movie has raked in $523 million globally. And Blumhouse’s latest release, Other Mommy, scared up $45 million-plus globally over its opening weekend in October against a reported budget of around $19 million, despite poor reviews.

Hits and misses. Blumhouse is able to co-finance most of its production costs. It has a “first-look deal” with Universal Pictures, meaning the studio calls dibs on the movies Blumhouse is producing. Under those circumstances (which is about half the time), Universal finances the movie, Small said. When it works with other distributors, like Sony Pictures or Lionsgate, Blumhouse usually splits the production budget 50/50.

“We’ve had years of slates now that stack on top of each other, and we’ve generated enough balance sheet capacity to be able to do most of this ourselves,” Small said.

But not every movie is a massive hit with an ROI the size of Paranormal Activity—with a total budget of $215,000, it earned $193 million at the box office. Blumhouse routinely decides how many projects it needs in the hopper in order to stay on track financially, according to Small.

“I think capital allocation for movies comes down to making sure you have a portfolio and that you’re seeding enough money to have a portfolio,” he said. “You can almost think about it like an investment fund. You need to have enough at-bats, you need to have enough movies in the marketplace to be able to have some that do great, and some that don’t do great, and some that do average, and be able to have enough at-bats so that you can have a hit that can really drive a lot of performance.”