Black Phone 2 Dials Up a Box Office Win, Leaving Tron: Ares Lagging as Blumhouse Rebounds

Horror quietly walked in, grabbed the weekend, and turned off the lights. Black Phone 2 opened at number one in the U.S., while Tron: Ares stumbled hard in its second frame.

Box office snapshot

Black Phone 2 banked an estimated $26.5 million in its first weekend. For context, the original Black Phone debuted to $23 million back in 2022, so the sequel actually ticked up. October doing what October does.

Meanwhile, Tron: Ares looks like it hit a bug in week two, pulling in $11.1 million. If you speak fluent Tron, the threat level for getting derezzed is... not low.

Why this matters for Blumhouse

Blumhouse needed this. The studio has had a bumpy 2025, with a run of titles that either underperformed or barely cleared the bar. Compared to earlier crowd-pleasers like Speak No Evil and Insidious: The Red Door, this year has felt tighter.

• Wolf Man: $35 million, which the studio basically needed just to square the budget
• The Woman in the Yard: $23.2 million
• Drop: $28.7 million
• M3GAN 2.0: $40 million, a big step down from the original's $181 million breakout

That last one clearly stung. Jason Blum even unpacked it on The Town with Matthew Belloni, admitting they got a little high on their own doll supply.

"We all thought M3GAN 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 the bad guy into the good guy. And we kind of classically overthought how powerful people's engagement was with her."

The takeaway

Black Phone 2 lands as a clean win right when Blumhouse needed one, proving that a straightforward scary movie in October is still the safest bet in the business. Tron: Ares, on the other hand, is fighting for attention in week two and losing ground fast.

Black Phone 2 is now in theaters.