‘Black Phone 2’ Cements R-Rated Horror Streak Ahead of ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’, ‘Predator’ Popularity Tests
Blumhouse finally caught up to its peers last month with Black Phone 2, the go-to horror film of this Halloween season.
The supernatural slasher first opened to $27.3 million domestically, which was more than any of the cumulative grosses earned by the prodco’s prior 2025 efforts, including M3GAN 2.0’s somber summer run that stopped the seemingly budding franchise dead in its tracks.
Since then, Black Phone has edged its way into the top 10 R-rated films of the year, where horror has dominated over other sizable efforts.
Dependable Warner Bros. franchise The Conjuring leads the pack of established IP, but original film Sinners remains the undisputed winner of theatrical films for adults. Another original, August’s Weapons, still towers over most other R-rated films, while Japanese anime sequel Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle is the best non-horror effort carrying the R rating, having grossed twice as much as Warners’ Leonardo DiCaprio-led One Battle After Another and hundreds of millions more overseas.
Other than that, Amazon MGM’s sequel to Ben Affleck starrer The Accountant finished on the lower end and was outgrossed by Sony’s 28 Years Later reboot, and John Wick spinoff Ballerina, with Ana de Armas stepping in as the action hero, failed to pass $60 million domestically.
As for comedy, January’s One of Them Days made it to $50 million, but Black Phone 2 squeezed that out of the top 10 R-rated performers.
Technically, Blumhouse’s merger with Conjuring producer Atomic Monster in 2024 means it did catch a bit of Last Rites’ success, but its focus on PG-13 horror this year likely proved fatal.
Close to 90% of all horror movies earning at least $1 million domestically this year were rated R. Only two of those — Black Phone 2 and January’s Wolf Man — were produced by Blumhouse, whose The Woman in the Yard, Drop and M3GAN 2.0 account for three of the four PG-13 horror movies released in 2025 so far.
The fourth, IFC and Shudder’s Good Boy, is a well-received festival hit that earned $6.6 million, a best for the indie distributor this year. Good Boy’s protagonist is also a live-action dog, and the film is barely a feature at 72 minutes, making it somewhat of a gimmicky outlier from what Blumhouse films typically entail.
Still, Blumhouse may get the last scream this year. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is due Dec. 5, a time frame similar to its 2023 predecessor, which finished its run as Blumhouse’s best global performer in the company’s history. Even more impressive, the film released on Peacock concurrently with its domestic theatrical run, giving the sequel a decent shot at surpassing the $291 million earned by the first.
While it’s another PG-13 effort from Blumhouse, Five Nights at Freddy’s has a fanbase well under 17, and PG-13 is still a good match for tentpole films that blur the line with horror. After all, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was a hit last year, and Jurassic World Rebirth still amassed $868 million this summer, even if it’s the first in a decade to miss the $1 billion mark.
Where the PG-13 tentpole gets trickier is this weekend’s Predator: Badlands, the first of any standalone Predator or Alien film to ditch the R rating. It’s a bold move to make with fans, as Hulu’s Prey, the last Predator film, did well critically and was a draw for the service. Likewise, 2024’s Alien: Romulus made it past $100 million domestically and made well over twice as much in international markets.
As much as Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 and Predator: Badlands will test the efficacy of PG-13 horror, it’s hard to overlook how the success of the gorefest Terrifier films made outside of the studio system has preceded an influx of hard-R horror. Blumhouse may have another chance to cement Five Nights at Freddy’s legs this December, but it’s hard to look past the reality that no Blumhouse film, domestically or globally, has ever done as well as Sinners did in 2025.
