← The Town with Matthew Belloni
The Town with Matthew Belloni
Jason Blum Opens Up About the 'M3GAN 2.0' Flop, the Blumhouse Slump, and Bouncing Back
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- [00:00]
Zach Lowe
Welcome to the brand new Zach Lowe Show. That's right, I'm back to have the same in depth NBA conversations you're used to. We're going to talk about the games, the X's and O's, the drama. The playoffs are coming up and now you get to see every episode in full on video on Spotify and on my own YouTube channel. Episodes drop every Monday and Thursday with a collection of guests you're going to love. So make sure you follow and subscribe to the brand new Zach Lowe show on Spotify or wherever you watch or listen. Listen to your podcast. Let's go.
- [00:37]
Matt Bellany
It is Tuesday, July 1. It's been a tough year so far for Blumhouse, the typically very successful production company of mostly scary movies that's run by Jason Blum, the Oscar nominated producer who's made a fortune in the low budget horror genre. Just in 2025 alone, Blumhouse has been behind Wolfman, the Lady in the Yard, Drop, and now Megan 2.0, a sequel to the mega hit Megan, all released by Universal. Those movies his longtime partner. None of these movies cost a ton to produce. Most are in the $20 million range or so, but none of them connected. They followed a tough 2024 as well for Blumhouse, which has been the quintessential example of a Hollywood production company that figured out a successful model. Lower budgets, a proven genre that has remained theatrical as others have fallen away. Innovative marketing, et cetera, et cetera. Megan 2.0 is a particularly puzzling situation. The first one opened to 30 million in January 2023, ultimately grossed 180 million worldwide. The tracking on the new one started high, but then kept dropping and dropping until it flatlined at a $10 million opening. The overseas number is much better. Unlike most producers who escape to their beach houses and turn off their phones when their movies don't work, Jason actually called me yesterday and asked to come on the town to talk about it all. I am not a licensed therapist, but I am very interested in the art and science of learning from defeat, especially in the business of entertainment that produces so many failures. So today Jason Blum is here to talk about Megan 2.0 and his flops, how they happen, his process for dealing with them, and how he recovers from the ringer and puck. I'm Matt Bellany and this is the.
- [02:20]
Jason Blum
All right.
- [02:21]
Matt Bellany
We are here with Jason Blum, the founder and CEO of Blumhouse. Welcome Jason.
- [02:27]
Jason Blum
Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.
- [02:29]
Matt Bellany
I gotta say, typically thank you for.
- [02:33]
Jason Blum
Saying yes when I Begged. When. I didn't beg. But when I asked to be on your show this morning, I thought, I think you were quite surprised to get that call.
- [02:40]
Matt Bellany
I will be honest. I was. I typically will get those calls from producers who have hits over the weekend and would like to come on the show and talk all about the hit and the process and everything they did right that led to a big smash opening weekend. You were the opposite. You were basically. Well, you tell me, why are you doing this? Why do you want to come on the show?
- [03:03]
Jason Blum
First, let me tell your dear listeners, of which I'm one. The exchange. I called Matt and his first response was, oh, so you're calling me to tell you there's, like, a little glimmer of hope in, like, Indonesia with Megan. Like, what is.
- [03:19]
Matt Bellany
You found $20 million?
- [03:20]
Jason Blum
Yeah. What is the bright spot? And I said, matt, you know, I've been. I've been. I've been in pain all weekend long, and I've been thinking about all this stuff way too much. And this morning I woke up and we started to. Not surprisingly, this person was inquiring, what's happening to Blumhouse? Blumhouse this, Blumhouse that. And I thought, you know what? If Blumhouse is in a slump, I'd like to tell that story. I don't want other people tell that story, number one. And number two, one of the things that is so annoying about our business is everyone, you know, sweeps. Everyone says, oh, I learned so much from failure. But when they're actually in a situation where things are not going well, they. They sweep it under the rug. They pretend it's not happening. As your point is, everyone who comes on your show is on your show when everything is going right. And then they tell you all the lessons they learned from when everything wasn't going right. And I said, you know what? I want to go on Matt's show when everything isn't going right, in the right middle of the pain and talk about that, which I think, I don't know, if it were me on the other side of it would be much more helpful, much more amusing, and certainly much more honest. And the last thing you know, luckily, I don't run a public company. Blumhouse is not a public company. So it's not like I have to pretend on an earnings call. So listen, let's not pretend. Let's call it what it is and get into it. So that's why I called you.
- [04:51]
Matt Bellany
Well, and as I said to you, 99% of producers would like to have Your problem where you had four movies come out in the first half of a year that you produced and had a big stake in. So that's not very often you see that among fans.
- [05:06]
Jason Blum
That's true. That's true. That's true. That's one of the lessons here. But, yes.
- [05:11]
Matt Bellany
So let's get into it. Why didn't this movie work, Megan? Big hit, open to $30 million, got to 180 worldwide sequel, put immediately into production, comes out 18 months later. You moved it from a January opening for the first one into the middle of summer. It had all the elements. The creatives were all back. The star was back. Why didn't this movie work?
- [05:33]
Jason Blum
Well, this is a great. This is a great Hollywood story. And mind you, it's only been three days. And so really, you know, I'll have a more thoughtful answer to that, you know, if we talk at Christmas. But I will say just. Just to summarize it, 10 weeks ago, the number we were batting around was $45 million. And we were seriously talking about how amazing it would be for the little movie Meghan to outgrow F1.
- [06:01]
Matt Bellany
That's right. People were talking about people.
- [06:03]
Jason Blum
We're talking about that.
- [06:04]
Matt Bellany
Yes.
- [06:05]
Jason Blum
This tells you how. How bananas tracking is in this current marketplace. Now, the other thing about the current marketplace is clearly there is a huge audience who is excited to go to the movies. The key is we can't figure out what movies they want to go see.
- [06:22]
Matt Bellany
Yeah.
- [06:22]
Jason Blum
So anyway, just to continue, eight weeks ago, was it 40. Six weeks ago, it was at 35, and I was still very happy. Four weeks ago, it was at 30. Where it lived for a long time. The first movie did 32. I said, you know, we had it in. We thought we do, you know, maybe 20% less than that than the first movie. So 30 was good. International, same thing. Five days before opening, it goes from 30 to 20. That's Monday. So then I was upset. So then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Thursday, we were at. We were really at a, you know, 20, maybe 19. But, you know, and I was like, in a death spiral of depression. Wake up Monday morning, it's 10. So it's pretty. It's pretty. It's pretty amazing how. And I think that's a new thing about the marketplace. I think the marketplace is just. It's very different. And it's incredibly hard to get your arms around.
- [07:22]
Matt Bellany
It turns on a dime, and when it turns, it can really turn.
- [07:26]
Jason Blum
And it can. And when it turns, it turns fast and hard. Right.
- [07:30]
Matt Bellany
So what happened? What in Your estimation happened three big.
- [07:35]
Jason Blum
Pillars, all with the North Star or pillar one and two, certainly with the North Star. That which is a classic Hollywood story is we at Blumhouse and our partners too. But really, I really want to make sure this is a podcast about Blumhouse, not about the people that we worked with, not about the studios that we're partners with. You know, this little 20 minute thing is our story around. Around this little slump. And we all thought Megan 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. So my three part thing is the first part is we decided to genre swap. Audience was not ready to genre swap. So that has to do with it.
- [08:34]
Matt Bellany
It was less of a thriller horror picture and more of an actiony comedy picture.
- [08:40]
Jason Blum
Exactly, exactly. And people wanted more Meghan, just like she is now. Every time you do a sequel, you have to ride this very fine line, which is if you make it too close to the first movie, everyone says, you ripped off the first movie and why'd you make this movie? What a waste of time. And if you make it too far away from the first movie, everyone says, why the fuck is this a sequel? This is. This has nothing to do with the first movie. And we're pissed about it.
- [09:02]
Matt Bellany
The same, but different. We talk about that on the show a lot. It's got to be the same, but different.
- [09:06]
Jason Blum
So the second thing is we thought she could live in the summer, right? We thought like we got a 10. We're going from a little horror movie to a tentpole, right? We thought she could live in the summer.
- [09:15]
Matt Bellany
Well, you did that with the Purge, though. It kind of worked for the purge, right?
- [09:19]
Jason Blum
It's worked, but that was pre Covid, you know, it's a different market. It's just a different market. The third thing is when you genre switch, your execution has to be A plus. And we did get a higher cinema score on this Megan than our last Megan.
- [09:36]
Matt Bellany
Well, I want to ask you about that because it is interesting. You got a B, which is like an A for horror.
- [09:41]
Jason Blum
The few who saw it really liked it, right. The critics was mixed a little worse than the first Megan. I think for that, you know, we had the Gerard is a terrific director and I could point to exactly what happened there, which is on the first Megan Gerard is someone who can solve almost anything you throw at him but needs time. And he's just one of those directors that needs a lot of time. And on the first Megan, he had all the time in the world. I don't think we even had a release date until the movie got finished. And on this again, we got over our skis too far. Summer movie, change the genre, set the date and we got too excited. We got too excited by Megan and she didn't work. So. So that's what happened. So that's the story of Megan.
- [10:27]
Matt Bellany
Okay. But that doesn't explain the initial excitement for the movie and the tail off. And I do wonder if the social media element here is also a big factor, because the first Megan really captured that. It became a thing. It became part of everyone's TikTok feedback and the dance and the memes and all of it. And I know that is eternally frustrating for filmmakers and studios because you can't control that and you can't really create that. And is it just the fact that this time around it didn't catch fire like that? There was nothing that told people this is fun and cool and different?
- [11:14]
Jason Blum
No, I mean, I have a little different spin on it. I think that we all, collectively, we push that too hard. I think that really works if it's organic.
- [11:22]
Matt Bellany
Oh, interesting. So it felt inauthentic.
- [11:25]
Jason Blum
The die hard fans loved it. But if you were kind of like, yeah, Megan was fun, I might go see the second one. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What's this? What's all this stuff? You know, I think in my mind that that probably has more to do with it, but really, you know, your question is one, that, that we're still, we're still trying to figure out, like, how was it so strong and then reduced so fast? And that I, that I. That I really don't have an answer to, but I have an answer to why. Why, you know, hindsight's 20 20, but why the movie didn't work.
- [11:53]
Matt Bellany
Okay, do you guys have a process, a post mortem process for movies when they either do or don't work? Is there a Monday morning meeting? Is there something where you go through a checklist and say, this we did well, this we didn't. What is your process for evaluating your performance and how are you planning to do so on a movie like Megan 2?
- [12:15]
Jason Blum
So the process for us really begins when the movie opens. And it's not, you know, it's not looking well. There's lots of like an enormous amount of theories, usually over email and over conversations over the weekend it coalesces a bit on Monday and Tuesday morning. We have a Monday morning meeting. Sometimes it's Monday, sometimes it's Tuesday. And the senior staff will talk and then I'll kind of hit like these are the highlights that are ringing the most. But the real kind of deep analysis we do do. We really do it very thoroughly and with a lot of discipline. And we try and really learn from our mistakes, but it really takes time. You have to get unemotional about it and you have to be able to have enough distance from the release to leave your emotions behind. And that's when we really look at. We'll have smaller meetings where we'll discuss and discuss and discuss and really dig into it. And then we, you know, we bring movies up. We have movies from, you know, we have a 15 year history of all these different movies. And you know, one of the things you think about when you have a moment like this is, is everyone talks about your success and thinks about, you know, your success. But one of the things I said to the company this morning is, you know, this reminds me of a moment we had, I don't know, is about 10 or 12 years ago and we had two movies coming out on the same date. We had Paranormal Activity 4 and Jim and the Holograms.
- [13:37]
Matt Bellany
I remember.
- [13:37]
Jason Blum
And I felt extremely bullish about both movies. But then I felt, look, worst case scenario, one of them's definitely gonna win. Right?
- [13:47]
Matt Bellany
Right.
- [13:47]
Jason Blum
So I booked to exactly to what we were talking about at the top of the interview, like the bragging show. Right. There was like some, some Q and A in front of 200 people. And it was Sunday morning at 10am and it was the weekend those two wide releases opened at the same time and they both didn't work.
- [14:04]
Matt Bellany
It's like playing roulette and you put money on black and red and then it hits double zero.
- [14:08]
Jason Blum
And it hits double zero.
- [14:10]
Matt Bellany
Exactly.
- [14:11]
Jason Blum
Exactly.
- [14:11]
Matt Bellany
Is there a. Is there a common thread in your mind among the flops? Is there something that you see over and over again? Forget good movie, bad movie. Is there something that you see in a movie that you're like, that's the reason why these movies didn't work?
- [14:28]
Jason Blum
No. That's why the movie business is so fun. There is no common thread. You know, it's always different. And some, some movies you just never really know and no, you know, and again, no one ever really knows. I know you'll never. We'll never really know why this movie didn't work.
- [14:42]
Matt Bellany
Just like we'll never know why the first one hit so big.
- [14:45]
Jason Blum
Exactly. And that's what, that's, that's, that's the fun of the movie business. But like I said before, if you look at Final Destination, if you look at Sinners, if you look at, to a lesser degree 28 years later, which, which I actually thought was a terrific movie. The thing that's so elusive is the, you know, if the, all the movies weren't working, it would be horrible, but it would be more, there'd be more explainable. But it's just so interesting what people especially post Covid in this new theatrical world, what they show up to. And to your point, the great news is when they show up, they're showing up bigger and more. But when they don't show up, they show up way less.
- [15:24]
Matt Bellany
It does get to this industry wide issue though. Do you think there is too much horror in the marketplace right now?
- [15:31]
Jason Blum
I do. I think we're used to a market that can absorb 12 to 15 horror movies where you get these singles and doubles. I don't think, I don't. I think that's gone. I think that's the thing. I mean maybe by the way, might come back, who knows. But for right now I don't think the market can absorb as much horror as there is for sure.
- [15:50]
Matt Bellany
And it's interesting that those three recent hits that you mentioned, all of those were more expensive than the kinds of movies you typically make. I mean Sinners, obviously we written about how expensive that one was, but 28 years later was in the 50 to 70 million range. Final destination around 50. Those are. When you get into those style movies, they've got to be hits or else you're going to lose your shirt on these. Your movies for the most part with exceptions tend to come in at lower costs than that. Do you maybe think that you need to up the budgets?
- [16:22]
Jason Blum
They come in at lower costs. We already have upped the budgets and I do think we need to up the budgets. I think people need events. I don't think you can get away. You can't break out. You can get. If you look at last year, one movie did over $100 million. That was a low budget horror movie. Long legs. That's it. I think it's virtually impossible to get out. To make a movie for four and a half million and have it do 250, I think you need theatrical events and that's a big thing that we are looking at. That's what we have. We have Black Phone 2 is a theatrical event. Five Nights at Freddy's is a theatrical event, more expensive movies. Our friends at Atomic Monster have the Conjuring and Mortal Kombat coming out. I think the death to success for an entrepreneur is to repeat what you've done before, because it worked. And I think, you know, one of the big things that we do and one of the big responsibilities we have to our filmmakers is to communicate to them what is working now. And what is working now is very different than what used to work for Blumhouse. And we are, you know, we are internalizing that, and we are pivoting as a result of it.
- [17:31]
Matt Bellany
So when you have a rough spot like this, is it a cause for existential meetings, discussions? Should we be making more? Should we be making less? How do you like a hitter in baseball? How do you get yourself out of a slump?
- [17:49]
Jason Blum
Should we be making more? Should we be making less? Absolutely existential. No. And one of the things that. When you're younger and one of the things I said to the company this morning is if you look at any massive talent, whether they're a movie star or whether they're a production company or whether they're a studio in the movie business, every one of your favorite people have gone through slumps, and that applies to Blumhouse, too. So you can't erase 15 years of what we've done of the filmmakers that we've worked with for a little slump. So you got to dust off your. You can't be existent. I mean, at least I'm not existential about it. But at the same time, you can't cover your ears. So you have to say, like, I think we should look at this late. I think we are going to look at this late. Did we make too many movies this year? Right. And are our movies theatrical events? You know, and that's. And that's a different filter than we used a year ago. And if we kept using the same filter, then it would be an existential crisis, because I think we'd be out of business.
- [18:52]
Matt Bellany
Right. And what are those conversations like with Universal, which releases most of your movies and has a stake in your company? Are you a big screaming on the phone? Let's figure out who takes the blame for this one, guys. How is that Universal relationship?
- [19:10]
Jason Blum
I'm the opposite of that. I shoulder the blame for this. Not Universal. We shoulder the blame for this.
- [19:16]
Matt Bellany
Yeah, but. But you delivered a movie that got a higher cinema score than the previous one, and it opened to a third of the amount as the previous one. So marketing and distribution play a role there.
- [19:28]
Jason Blum
Yeah, they. They Play a role. But. But we're, we're in this together. And, you know, we've. I've made plenty. I've made. I've made plenty of movies that have gotten to Four Rotten Tomatoes. And they don't call me and say, you know, you messed up. You know, we, we lock arms and we understand. And they understand, like I understand that the business is a long term. It goes on a long time. Universal's had the same thing. They've been in slums, too. I've been. They've been in one or two slums the time that we've been partners with them. Now I think they're doing an incredible job. They're going to have an amazing opening with Jurassic Park. They're like firing on all cylinders. And I share with them my learnings and they give me notes. You know, they say, well, this may be, maybe not, maybe this, maybe not. But, you know, I felt, and I said at the premiere, very publicly, when we started this movie with marketing, I remember when Wicked was everywhere. I made a joke with Michael Moses. I said, I want Megan to feel like Wicked.
- [20:22]
Matt Bellany
He runs the marketing film.
- [20:23]
Jason Blum
You know what? Whether you like the marketing or didn't like the marketing or whatever you felt like it did, at least to me it did. It was everywhere. And everyone tried. Everyone, everyone put their back in it. And it's not productive to point fingers. And it's why I'm doing your show, because it drives me insane. People don't, you know, people should take. And I, as you pointed out, I take credit when credit's due. Whiplash should get out or on my New York Times list. And I. Oh, you.
- [20:51]
Matt Bellany
You voted for yourself. That's right, I outed you.
- [20:54]
Jason Blum
I voted for myself. I take credit when credit's due, but I also take blame. And if you don't take blame, you should not take credit.
- [21:02]
Matt Bellany
For the record, if I did, a ballot whiplash will be on it, so I would vote for that one as well.
- [21:06]
Jason Blum
Thank you. Appreciate it.
- [21:08]
Matt Bellany
And I remember talking to you around five nights at Freddy's, and that one surprised you on the other end. I think it surprised you how well it opened.
- [21:16]
Jason Blum
Shocked. Only Scott, who's a genius and way smarter than me, knew what happened.
- [21:22]
Matt Bellany
Scott Mendelssohn? Yes.
- [21:23]
Jason Blum
Not that I didn't like the movie. I liked the movie. I thought the movie was good. I thought it played. I had no idea what it would do.
- [21:30]
Matt Bellany
Are you scared now about your other sequels?
- [21:33]
Jason Blum
No. The ones that we have, I'm not scared about.
- [21:35]
Matt Bellany
Why?
- [21:37]
Jason Blum
For the movies we have not produced a straight up scary event movie that has not worked. If we do that, I will be scared.
- [21:50]
Matt Bellany
Wait, what about Exorcist? That was supposed to be big trilogy and that one didn't work well.
- [21:56]
Jason Blum
It was supposed to be a straight up scary movie, but the problem with the Exorcist was it was way too much of a drama. You can't look at the Exorcist and say, that scared me. Like the conjuring movies we set out to do that we just, we didn't. By the way, David Gordon Green has done an incredible job for us and.
- [22:12]
Matt Bellany
He did Halloween to much success.
- [22:15]
Jason Blum
We all linked arms in that one too. The original Exorcist really plays like a drama. And so we got too close to the original and that one we didn't get far enough away from the original. Right.
- [22:25]
Matt Bellany
And it's not 1975 anymore.
- [22:28]
Jason Blum
Correct. It's not 1975 anymore, but we have yet to. If we make a straight up scary event movie, it doesn't work. Maybe I'll be saying it's existential and I'll be hiding from you.
- [22:38]
Matt Bellany
Yeah. How much do you talk to James Wan, your partner, about this stuff? He's also very smart about horror.
- [22:49]
Jason Blum
I talk to him all the time. He, he's. He's not just smart about horror. He's really, really smart about the audience. He is a fan himself in a profound way. He's really smart about marketing. He's as good as you get in the world of scary and other things too. And we talk about this stuff all the time. And all the, all the, all the emails that I'm on about Megan, he's on too. And we're putting our brain trust together and we're going to come back swinging.
- [23:17]
Matt Bellany
He didn't call this one.
- [23:19]
Jason Blum
No one called it. I mean, who called it?
- [23:22]
Matt Bellany
Not me. I. On the confidence scale. I thought this one would work.
- [23:26]
Jason Blum
Me too.
- [23:27]
Matt Bellany
We all did.
- [23:28]
Jason Blum
We all did. We all did. Look, the other thing that I'll say, you know, and the phrase in my defense comes, but I'm going to let that go for a second, is one thing it's not going to do. And one thing I think it's important to celebrate even if the financial results are not there, is we took a shot, right? Took a shot. We said, can we take this, this horror movie and turn it into a crazy sci fi action, whatever. And I think there's so much pressure on originals and there's so many fewer originals that what I hope Megan does is. Doesn't discourage other people who make sequels to now make them too close to the first. You know, I think there's some sequels that are very different and that do work. This one didn't happen to be. But we took a creative risk. And I really hope that people continue to take creative risks within the walls of their franchises. Otherwise the movies will feel all the same.
- [24:27]
Matt Bellany
Right. Who do you ask for input and advice outside of your partner at the company, outside of your studio partner, who do you call for a unfiltered non ass kissy piece of advice on how to release a movie of yours?
- [24:45]
Jason Blum
Artists. Always artists. The best advice you can get about your own art is artists, including marketing. James for one. Right? Including on Blumhouse movies. Always James. But they're, you know, Scott Derrickson, David Gordon Green, I mean, and the Tammy. There's, you know, all the directors that we were. Leigh Whannell, the directors that we were.
- [25:07]
Matt Bellany
You call them and say, should we be doing more 30 second spots or more digital?
- [25:11]
Jason Blum
Mike Flanagan. No, no. But I call him and say, what does this movie feel like? Are you seeing this? Are you excited to see this movie? Yes or no? If yes, why? If no, why? And you know, funnily enough, my father used to say that about paintings. Like when someone would say to him, my father was an art dealer and, and someone would say to him, how you know the good ones from the bad ones? He says, well, I trust, I trust my taste, but I also, I ask other artists. That's who I rely on.
- [25:38]
Matt Bellany
And do you get a feeling when it's a week from release, do you get that feeling where this is working or holy shit, this is not working?
- [25:48]
Jason Blum
Well, we get tracking that suggests that.
- [25:50]
Matt Bellany
No, no, no, but beyond the numbers, do you sometimes say the numbers are saying this, but I feel differently.
- [25:57]
Jason Blum
It's funny, I get it off of. I don't necessarily agree with the numbers, but if you're tracking to 14 on a Friday, you're gonna open to 14 on a Monday, it's gone up. The weekend before your movie comes out, it's building. And you know that. You really do know that. That's one thing you can read. One thing. We what we didn't know how low was going to go, but it was going the wrong direction. And I think one of the things that, that you, that you learn in today's theatrical world is if you're going south the weekend before, there is no bottom.
- [26:30]
Matt Bellany
It's been that way for a decade. Even pre Covid. Remember the Brute? It was the Bruno weekend. The first time we really saw that social media killed a movie from Friday to Sunday was Bruno. And it was like, holy shit, you can't market your way to an opening anymore.
- [26:47]
Jason Blum
No, you can't. And the disadvantage that we have as theatrical producers, distributors, marketers, is streamers. They know what kind of T shirt their audience is where. They just know. They have so much data. They know everything about their audience. And the fun thing about the movies business and the difficult thing is we just don't. So it's much less of a science and much more of an art and a gut feel. And again, when the movie works, it really feels. That feels like more fun. It's hard to say it feels like more fun when it doesn't, but in a way it does. It's more exciting. You can't, like, retrofit or build a movie to work. You just can't do it.
- [27:26]
Matt Bellany
Craig, are you in shock right now that a producer has come on to talk about his failure?
- [27:31]
Jason Blum
I hope this is a first.
- [27:33]
Craig Horbaugh
It is a first. And hopefully this, you know, causes more people to come on and do for business. Yeah, we are. So this is all I wanted.
- [27:41]
Jason Blum
I'm shouting out to everyone in the movie business that sometimes it goes great and sometimes it doesn't. And it's important to talk at both times.
- [27:50]
Matt Bellany
I agree. All right, well, congratulations for all of your success, this movie notwithstanding, and for your candor and willingness to come on the show. We appreciate it.
- [27:59]
Jason Blum
Thanks for having me on so quickly. Talk to you later.
- [28:03]
Matt Bellany
We are back with the call sheet. Craig, I'm going to ask you again your stance towards dinosaur movies, but I already know the answer because I sat next to you during the premiere of Jurassic World Dominion in 2022, and you liked that movie even though it was not great.
- [28:21]
Craig Horbaugh
Well, I enjoy them while in them and then I never think about them again.
- [28:26]
Matt Bellany
Dinosaur is always fun. And Spielberg's mantra on these movies gotta have kids. Like, it's smart kids in peril. Dinosaurs always works.
- [28:34]
Craig Horbaugh
Yeah. This franchise for me, falls in between Fast and Furious where I'm like, they need to stop making these. And Mission Impossible where I'm like, okay, I'm pretty excited about this. It's somewhere in between those two.
- [28:44]
Matt Bellany
Yeah, it's so funny. This is Jurassic World Rebirth, which is a get it into production sequel that they said they were not going to do. And then I think Universal realized after some delays on other movies that, holy shit, we don't have a big event movie for summer 2025. They started putting out this narrative that the Script came in and it was just so amazing that they had to fast track this movie as soon as possible and get it into production. And yes, it's going to hit that summer 2025 date.
- [29:17]
Craig Horbaugh
Well, the script was written by the original Jurassic park screenwriter, David Koepp. The Chris Pratt ones were not written by David Koepp.
- [29:24]
Matt Bellany
True. And they have Gareth Edwards who got. He's been kind of tossed around a little after the Star wars experience. But the reviews on this one, not great, 58% as I am looking at it. And the tracking is really interesting because it is opening over the five day weekend. It's Wednesday through Saturday, Sunday. And most numbers are big. Big disparity here because of how big it is. But it's around 130. NRG has it at 128. I've seen some that have it a little higher. I'm going to set the line at 1:30 and I will take the over on that because the last one got to 145 for its opening weekend and that was not a holiday. That was in June, June 10. So even if there is a significant decline for this one, which I think there will be, I think this is going to be the first Jurassic movie in of the Jurassic worlds to not get to a billion. But I think this one will exceed 130 for the opening.
- [30:24]
Craig Horbaugh
Yeah, I tend to agree with you. I think what Dominion, the 2022 one had going for it was, you know, it's the last one in the quote unquote trilogy.
- [30:32]
Matt Bellany
Yeah, the Endgame did with all the originals.
- [30:34]
Craig Horbaugh
People were returning. Yes, Goldblum came back. Laura Dern came back. This one though, it's like Scarlett Johansson, I think a bankable star. Marshall Ali's great. Jonathan Bailey from Wicked. You know, there's a dinosaur whale.
- [30:49]
Matt Bellany
I don't know, there's some vitriol online about it. People are saying it's pointless. But you know what? They're all pointless. All of these sequels are pointless. Just go have a good time. It's fine.
- [31:00]
Craig Horbaugh
Yeah, it's like, is John Wick 4? Is that not pointless? But it was great and I liked it.
- [31:04]
Matt Bellany
Yeah, we'll see. Neither of us has seen it, but yeah, I'm going to take the over on that one. We'll see how it goes. All right, that's the show for today. I want to thank my guest, Jason Plum, producer Greg Horbeck, Predator Jesse Lopez and I want to thank you. We'll see you next week.