Latest news with #FinalReckoning
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Jason Blum on Those Big Budgets for Horror Movies and Why ‘Sinners' Is the Exception to the Rule
Blumhouse founder Jason Blum has an axe to grind when he hears people say Ryan Coogler's 'Sinners' is not a horror film. Admittedly, the movie is a genre-bending period film and folk fable about the roots of blues music, but it's got vampires killing people in it, so it's a horror movie. And Blum wants you to know it. 'Sinners'' box office success — $350 million worldwide to date — has defied expectations for what an original horror film can do, and even though Blum didn't make it, it's good for his business when the genre as a whole thrives. But much of the discussion around that movie before its release was its hefty budget — a reported $90 million — that complicated its path to profitability. For Blum, he's built his empire on movies made on the cheap that can still be marketed as events, break out in a big way, and spawn franchises. But as Blumhouse has scaled up and the demand for horror has increased, Blumhouse can't make movies as modestly, and the industry too runs into challenges to continue to make horror movies work financially. More from IndieWire 'Titan: The OceanGate Disaster' Review: A Surface-Level Netflix Documentary About the Submersible Implosion Heard Around the World Tom Cruise Has Never Been Happy with His Breath-Defying Underwater Scenes, So 'Final Reckoning' Went Three Times Bigger Blum on Tuesday took the stage in Hollywood at a press event called The Business of Fear, in which he and a panel of Blumhouse and Atomic Monster associates discussed box office trends for the genre and how horror has evolved over the years, such that the genre 'horror' can't be viewed so narrowly. IndieWire asked him about 'Sinners,' a movie he says is 'one of my favorite horror movies I've seen in a long time,' and why he felt 'Sinners' was the rare exception to the rule about making horror movies work on such a massive scale. 'We are definitely not interested in doing movies with that size a budget. That said, I'm glad they had the budget that they had because I think it really helped make the movie rich and incredible and amazing; but we are not going to make horror movies at that level anytime soon, maybe ever,' Blum said in the panel discussion. 'The bigger the budget, the more strain on the creative and the more sanding down of edges. And I think, generally speaking, 'Sinners' being the exception, the product is less interesting. So we are committed to lower budgets to continue to be able to take creative risks and do interesting things, which I think is harder to do when you have more money.' Blumhouse, following its merger with James Wan's Atomic Monster, has scaled up significantly such that it needs to have 'major studio-level success,' as Blum puts it. That means $100 million+ movies, which even for Blum and Wan is rare for movies made for just $1 million. He acknowledges that an indie like last year's 'Longlegs' pulled off the feat, and films like 'Terrifier 3' came dang close, Blum said today 'it's much harder to do what we started doing 15 years ago.' 'So the way that we've addressed that is by adding a bit of money to our model; but still, by studio standards, for instance, the budgets of our movies are 60 percent off the average sticker price, actually probably more, 75 percent off, the average sticker price,' Blum said. Blumhouse has five remaining movies on its slate for 2025, all of them sequels, including 'M3GAN 2.0,' 'Five Night's at Freddy's 2,' a new 'Conjuring' movie, 'The Black Phone 2,' and 'Mortal Kombat 2.' At the event, Blumhouse also announced it's in development on 'Ma 2,' with Octavia Spencer set to return. But it's threading a needle in finding original properties that someday can be the next major franchise for Blumhouse. Together with Atomic Monster it's branching out into video games, an exciting growth area to tell other horror stories, but Blumhouse president Abhijay Prakash explained that they're positioned to adapt one of those games into a film should one break out, though that wasn't the reason it launched the division. Blumhouse also announced at the event it will be adapting another indie horror game hit, 'Phasmaphobia.' Blum is also staying true to the company's philosophy about finding good stories, things that are genuinely scary, rather than trying to stack them with stars or buzzy directors and figure out the rest later. IndieWire asked Blum about a recent viral video from Charli XCX in which she pitched the idea of a 'Final Destination' movie starring all 'It Girls,' and directed by Coralie Fargeat for good measure. Blum hadn't seen the video, but he'd want to hear a bit more. 'Generally, I am not a fan, I think no one on this panel is, of reverse-engineering movies. You never get a good result,' he said. 'It's how, unfortunately, the vast majority of movies are made, but it's very hard to get a good movie reverse-engineering it.' Blum added the studio is unlikely to again release a movie day-and-date in theaters and on Peacock as it did with 'Five Nights at Freddy's' but won't be repeating with the sequel. Horror works best in the theater, not at home, and it's the reason the genre has consistently grown in popularity and still hasn't reached its peak. He says it will lead to movies that are one day constructed very differently for theatrical than they are for streaming — not just a difference in quality or budgets — and horror is very equipped for that evolution. 'Horror, in my mind, is the only genre that you just can't get what you are going to see a horror movie for at home on TV. It doesn't work,' he said. 'The only way to be really scared is when your phone is not with you and when you are in a dark room with a lot of other people and you are fully focused on a movie. You guys try it. Watch a horror movie on streaming, and when you know a scare is coming, look away for two seconds and look back. It stops working. It's just, your suspension of disbelief is broken, and when you are leading that up to a scare, you are just not scared. It's actually made horror in cinema stronger.' 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Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Michael Phillips: In a world of easily manipulated images, can movies retain their magic?
I love getting faked out by the movies. I love believing the impossible, if only for a moment. Moviewise, I live for a lot of things; one of them, by which I was floored at the age 5, was Buster Keaton's 'Cops' (1922) and his startling genius as a physical and comic presence. Half the time, at that age, I wasn't sure if what I was watching was actually happening. That's how it is with beautiful illusions, created from real risks that become the audience's reward. When the right people collaborate on the right movie, it sometimes happens: a fresh combination of legitimately dangerous stunt work and crafty but not frantic editing, along with the inevitable layer of digital effects elements. What do you get? Honest fakery. The best kind. The kind that elicits a single, astonished, delighted response in the mind of the beholder: Can I believe what I just saw? Across eight 'Mission: Impossible' movies, including the one now in theaters, Tom Cruise has been doing the damnedest stunts for nearly 30 years to provoke that response. Action movies can make anybody do anything on screen. Cruise doesn't do it alone; the digital effects teams stay pretty busy on the 'M:I' franchise. Cruise is now 62, and denying it with every maniacal sprint down some faraway city's waterfront boulevard. He knows that dangling, at high speed and altitude, from various parts of an antagonist's biplane in 'Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning' is a good, old-fashioned selling point, in an era crowded with deceptions. In 'Final Reckoning' we don't see the harnesses and cables ensuring that stunt's relative safety. Those implements have been digitally erased, a visual filmmaking practice now as common as the common cold. But there he is, the secret agent ascending and descending, with someone trying to kill him. Tom Cruise, doing something most of us wouldn't. Lately, though, the movie industry's most sought-after audience response — can you believe what we just saw? — lands differently than it did a few years ago. We mutter that question more darkly now, with troubling regularity. And it's not when we're at the movies. The real world lies to us visually all the time. An onslaught of photographs and videos are presented as verified visual evidence without the verification part. It happens everywhere around the world, every day. And I wonder if it's altering, and corroding, the bargain we make with the movies we see. Can honest fakery in the name of film escapism compete with the other kinds of fakery permeating our visual lives? 'It's an interesting question,' says University of California-Berkeley computer science professor Hany Farid, a specialist in digital forensics and manipulated media detection. 'It was easier to separate the movies from real life in the analog days, before digital. Now we live in a world where everything we see and hear can be manipulated.' The real-world stakes are high, Farid warns, because so much evidence in courts of law rests on the truthfulness of visual evidence presented. He says he's been asked to verify a dizzying number of photos for a variety of purposes. The questions never end: 'Is this image really from Gaza? Is this footage from Ukraine real? Is the image Donald Trump holds up on TV real, or manipulated for political purposes?' Farid's referring there to the alleged and quickly debunked veracity of the photo the president held up on camera during his March 2025 ABC News interview with Terry Moran. In the photo, Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, deported to an El Salvadoran prison, is shown as having 'MS-13' gang-signifying tattoos on his hand. The image, widely cited as having been altered, doesn't qualify as a deepfake, Farid says. 'It's not even a shallow-fake.' Manipulated images and audio have been with us as long as technology has made those images and sounds possible. Not long ago, manipulated falsehood and verifiable visual truth were a little easier to parse. 'When we went to the movies,' Farid says, 'we knew it wasn't real. The world was bifurcated: There were movies, which were entertainment, and there was reality, and they were different. What's happened is that they've started to bleed into each other. Our ground, our sense of reality, is not stable anymore.' Part of that is artificial intelligence, 'no question,' says Farid. 'Generative AI is not just people creating images that didn't exist or aren't what they're pretending to be. They accumulate to the point where we're living in a world in which everything is suspect. Trust is shaken, if not gone.' And here's the blurred line concerning the movies and real life, Farid says. Earlier, 'when we viewed images and video, or listened to audio, we thought they were real and generally we were right. And when we went to the movies, we knew the opposite: that they weren't real. Reality and entertainment — two different worlds. Now, though, they're bleeding into each other. The ground is not stable anymore.' That, in Farid's view, has a lot to do with contemporary American politics and a climate of strategic mistrust created by those in power. 'The outright lying,' he says, is 'dangerous for democracy and for society. And it makes the idea of believing in movies sort of weird.' Our entertainment can't get enough of AI as a villain right now. On HBO, we have 'Mountainhead' with its Muskian creator of next-generation deepfake software too good to pass up, or slow down. Meantime, the plot of the new 'Mission: Impossible' hinges on AI so fearsome and ambitious, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Though, for some of us, seeing Ethan Hunt dangle from a biplane, however rickety the narrative excuses for that to happen, is more fun. So we turn, still, to the movies for honest fakery we can trust. But these are strange days. As Farid puts it: 'You sit in the theater, you immerse yourself in the fantasy. But so much of our real world feels like that now — a fantasy.' Maybe it's time to retire the phrase 'seeing is believing.' ——— (Michael Phillips is the Chicago Tribune film critic.) ———
Forbes
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Mission: Impossible' Launches Inside The Top 10 As The Series Comes To An End
The score for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning debuts at No. 10 on the U.K.'s Official ... More Soundtrack Albums chart and No. 23 on the Album Downloads tally. NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 18: Tom Cruise arrives at the US Premiere of "Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning" at Lincoln Center Plaza in New York, New York on May 18, 2025. (Photo byfor Paramount Pictures) After only a few weeks in theaters, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning already ranks among the top 10 highest-grossing films of the year. Box Office Mojo reports that since being released in mid-May, what is being called the final installment in the action series starring Tom Cruise has raked in more than $360 million — and the total is still climbing. Mission: Impossible is beloved around the world and is remembered in part for its iconic theme song, but that's not the only bit of music from the series that people love. The score that was created for this latest film has proven commercially successful in at least one market where the movie is also widely embraced. The latest Mission: Impossible score debuts on two music charts in the U.K. this week. The full-length, which is credited to composers Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey, even manages a top 10 start on the Official Soundtrack Albums chart. The project launches at No. 10 on that tally. On that list, Mission: Impossible earns the loftiest debut of the frame, beating a new rendition of The Empire Strikes Back soundtrack, as well as several high-profile comebacks. The same studio effort also appears on the Official Album Downloads chart, which is not specific to any one genre, but instead to the digital format. On that list, Mission: Impossible opens at No. 23. Unlike on the soundtrack tally, the score doesn't earn the top start here. Instead, the composers come in behind new releases from U.K. favorites like When Rivers Meet, Louise Sparks, and Stereolab. Mission: Impossible is one of several Cruise-related titles with scores currently charting on the Official Soundtrack Albums ranking. The original Top Gun pushes 10 spaces to No. 16, while its follow-up Top Gun: Maverick reenters the ranking at No. 42. Both may experience gains thanks to all the excitement around the movie star's latest blockbuster. The Top Gun sequel is also present on the Official Compilations chart, where its accompanying album jumps several spots to No. 67 shortly after celebrating 150 weeks on the list.
Forbes
06-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
What Is Most Expensive Film Since 2015? Not Tom Cruise's ‘Mission'
Greg Tarzan Davis, Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg and Hayley Atwell in :Mission: Impossible - The Final ... More Reckoning." The reported $400 million production budget of Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is spendy, but surprisingly it's not the most expense film to be produced over the past 10 years. The Final Reckoning, which opened in theaters on May 23, saw its production budget balloon to $400 million over a variety of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, reshoots and the SAG-AFRTA and WGA strikes against the studios, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Amazingly, the film could have cost more if not for the 'tens of millions of dollars in tax incentives and rebates from the various countries' that was subtracted from production's cost, THR added. As massive as The Final Reckoning's production budget is, THR cited a pair of other films in the past 10 years that cost more to produce than Cruise's latest — and possibly last — film as Ethan Hunt. LONDON, ENGLAND - DECEMBER 16: Stormtroopers arrive for the European Premiere of "Star Wars: The ... More Force Awakens" at Leicester Square on December 16, 2015 in London, England. (Photo by) While Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning saw its costs skyrocket because of COVID-19 and the shutdowns caused by the industry strikes, THR noted that there are two other installments from major film franchises had even bigger production budgets. Interestingly, both of the films were released before the first nightmare throttled the entertainment industry in 2020. Among the most expensive films since 2015 was 2018's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which THR said had a $432 million production budget before marketing costs. Lucky for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, while the film cost a lot of money to make, it also made a lot of money at the box office. According to box office tracker The Numbers, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom earned nearly $418 million in North American theaters and $890 million internationally for a worldwide gross of $1.3 billion. While Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom had a massive production cost, THR reported that 2015's Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens had an even bigger production budget of $447 million. Once again, though, the film earned enough at the box office to justify its cost. Per The Numbers, The Force Awakens earned $936.66 million domestically (making it the highest-grossing film domestically of all time, before inflation) and $1.119 billon for a worldwide box office gross of $2.056 billion. It's worthy to note that The Numbers reported that the production budget for The Force Awakens was $533.2 million, a number considerably higher than THR's report on the Star Wars sequel's budget. The Numbers isn't the only outlet to report the $533.2 million figure — Forbes senior contributor Caroline Reid also cited the number in her detailed breakdown of the The Force Awakens production budget in February of 2023. While the final domestic, international and ultimately worldwide gross of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is yet to be determined, at least the film is off to a good start at the box office with $363 million in worldwide ticket sales since its opening on May 23 — an amount, of course, that will be split with theater owners. On top of that, there's one other budget The Final Reckoning needs to recoup — the film's marketing costs. THR, however, did not disclose what that number could be.
Chicago Tribune
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: In a world of easily manipulated images, can movies retain their magic?
I love getting faked out by the movies. I love believing the impossible, if only for a moment. Moviewise, I live for a lot of things; one of them, by which I was floored at the age 5, was Buster Keaton's 'Cops' (1922) and his startling genius as a physical and comic presence. Half the time, at that age, I wasn't sure if what I was watching was actually happening. That's how it is with beautiful illusions, created from real risks that become the audience's reward. When the right people collaborate on the right movie, it sometimes happens: a fresh combination of legitimately dangerous stunt work and crafty but not frantic editing, along with the inevitable layer of digital effects elements. What do you get? Honest fakery. The best kind. The kind that elicits a single, astonished, delighted response in the mind of the beholder: Can I believe what I just saw? Across eight 'Mission: Impossible' movies, including the one now in theaters, Tom Cruise has been doing the damnedest stunts for nearly 30 years to provoke that response. Action movies can make anybody do anything on screen. Cruise doesn't do it alone; the digital effects teams stay pretty busy on the 'M:I' franchise. Cruise is now 62, and denying it with every maniacal sprint down some faraway city's waterfront boulevard. He knows that dangling, at high speed and altitude, from various parts of an antagonist's biplane in 'Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning' is a good, old-fashioned selling point, in an era crowded with deceptions. In 'Final Reckoning' we don't see the harnesses and cables ensuring that stunt's relative safety. Those implements have been digitally erased, a visual filmmaking practice now as common as the common cold. But there he is, the secret agent ascending and descending, with someone trying to kill him. Tom Cruise, doing something most of us wouldn't. Lately, though, the movie industry's most sought-after audience response — can you believe what we just saw? — lands differently than it did a few years ago. We mutter that question more darkly now, with troubling regularity. And it's not when we're at the movies. The real world lies to us visually all the time. An onslaught of photographs and videos are presented as verified visual evidence without the verification part. It happens everywhere around the world, every day. And I wonder if it's altering, and corroding, the bargain we make with the movies we see. Can honest fakery in the name of film escapism compete with the other kinds of fakery permeating our visual lives? 'It's an interesting question,' says University of California-Berkeley computer science professor Hany Farid, a specialist in digital forensics and manipulated media detection. 'It was easier to separate the movies from real life in the analog days, before digital. Now we live in a world where everything we see and hear can be manipulated.' The real-world stakes are high, Farid warns, because so much evidence in courts of law rests on the truthfulness of visual evidence presented. He says he's been asked to verify a dizzying number of photos for a variety of purposes. The questions never end: 'Is this image really from Gaza? Is this footage from Ukraine real? Is the image Donald Trump holds up on TV real, or manipulated for political purposes?' Farid's referring there to the alleged and quickly debunked veracity of the photo the president held up on camera during his March 2025 ABC News interview with Terry Moran. In the photo, Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, deported to an El Salvadoran prison, is shown as having 'MS-13' gang-signifying tattoos on his hand. The image, widely cited as having been altered, doesn't qualify as a deepfake, Farid says. 'It's not even a shallow-fake.' Manipulated images and audio have been with us as long as technology has made those images and sounds possible. Not long ago, manipulated falsehood and verifiable visual truth were a little easier to parse. 'When we went to the movies,' Farid says, 'we knew it wasn't real. The world was bifurcated: There were movies, which were entertainment, and there was reality, and they were different. What's happened is that they've started to bleed into each other. Our ground, our sense of reality, is not stable anymore.' Part of that is artificial intelligence, 'no question,' says Farid. 'Generative AI is not just people creating images that didn't exist or aren't what they're pretending to be. They accumulate to the point where we're living in a world in which everything is suspect. Trust is shaken, if not gone.' And here's the blurred line concerning the movies and real life, Farid says. Earlier, 'when we viewed images and video, or listened to audio, we thought they were real and generally we were right. And when we went to the movies, we knew the opposite: that they weren't real. Reality and entertainment — two different worlds. Now, though, they're bleeding into each other. The ground is not stable anymore.' That, in Farid's view, has a lot to do with contemporary American politics and a climate of strategic mistrust created by those in power. 'The outright lying,' he says, is 'dangerous for democracy and for society. And it makes the idea of believing in movies sort of weird.' Our entertainment can't get enough of AI as a villain right now. On HBO, we have 'Mountainhead' with its Muskian creator of next-generation deepfake software too good to pass up, or slow down. Meantime, the plot of the new 'Mission: Impossible' hinges on AI so fearsome and ambitious, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Though, for some of us, seeing Ethan Hunt dangle from a biplane, however rickety the narrative excuses for that to happen, is more fun. So we turn, still, to the movies for honest fakery we can trust. But these are strange days. As Farid puts it: 'You sit in the theater, you immerse yourself in the fantasy. But so much of our real world feels like that now — a fantasy.' Maybe it's time to retire the phrase 'seeing is believing.'
