Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly series of takes on the industry’s passing parade. In the darkest night, some slivers of moonlight poke through. I won’t call them signs of hope or silver linings, but on a very slow week, signs of sanity reasserting itself, that entertainment in the end, conquers all. Amidst all the challenges, people are still doing things, pushing movies and TV to new frontiers, fighting back against the gloom. It’s not a Renaissance, but if a few people out there can keep the faith, so can we. And so, in these last days of spring that are already starting to feel like the summer doldrums, here are my reasons to hold back despair. 1. Horror Still Scares
This week, the folks at Blumhouse hosted a fascinating symposium on the Business of Horror, with the unsurprising (considering the source) but still convincing takeaway that the horror business is good! And one thing, frankly, we need right now more than anything is a genre or two that isn’t on life support. The case was made that genres ebb and flow, finding the right moment, and that horror has been on a run, increasing its share of the total box office for 20 years. It’s an ascent that continued unabated through 2024 and looks set to increase in 2025. According to Blumhouse, when a genre truly achieves lift-off, it divides into sub-genres with a vast diversity of audiences and models. The history of pop music was cited as a precedent for this, with a connection drawn between that genre and the current state of horror.
It is pretty remarkable just how broad the spectrum of horror has become. There is highbrow horror, and populist horror — ghosts, slashers, thrillers. It regularly produces franchise hits, and two of last year’s most critically acclaimed films — Nosferatu and The Substance — were well under the umbrella genre. The Blumhouse folks attest to having “identified 24 subgenres” active in the wild, as seen below:
I vote for less “gore” and “revenge” and more “holiday” and “cosmic” horror myself, but there’s something for everybody. By their accounting, it is one of cinema’s most original genres (over 80 percent of horror films since 2000 have stemmed from original screenplays) and the source of the healthiest franchises, with over half of horror releases spawning a sequel. It is hard to deny the importance of the genre; harder still to picture what the box office would look like without it, particularly as horror titles fill the spaces left by retreating studios. It also remains, to a large extent, not fantastically epically expensive when that tool kit seems to have escaped from every other genre. Bring on the boos!
2. Pop Goes the K-Pop Foreign films have disappeared from the box office. In 2024, there were all of two non-English films in the US top 100 — Demonslayer, an anime film, was the top, earning $17 million, making it the 76th highest-grossing U.S. release of the year. Coincidentally, or likely not, the country has at this time retreated into an aggressive nativism not seen in most of our lifetimes. So it’s something of a miracle that this week, Netflix — no tiny little niche producer — launched a major campaign touting its Korean-language library, under a slogan remarkable for the times: “You don't have to speak it to love it.” The ad, produced at some considerable expense, features cultural icons Martha Stewart, Lil Yachty and Squid Game star T.O.P. bonding over their favorite K-pop viewing obsessions. It makes sense for Netflix, given the phenomenal success of Squid Game, to hope they can extend that open door into other series. Given the vast amount of overseas production they do, getting the viewing door to swing both ways between cultures might end up being an existential question for the streamer. But still! At a time when studios have retreated mainly into safety and “pre-sold” corners, challenging viewers to extend their horizons is a bold move. And if politics is downstream from culture, re-opening American audiences to international perspectives is a mission we desperately need more companies to undertake.
Meanwhile, before I get to what’s happening with David Zaslav and Paramount-Skydance-Trump…... Subscribe to The Ankler. to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of The Ankler. to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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