Horror’s YouTube Gold Rush: Lionsgate Launches Render Road Days After Blumhouse Becomes Blumhouse Atomic
Two years ago, a studio executive who wanted the next big horror filmmaker went to film festivals. Now they open YouTube. In the span of three days this week, two of the most powerful companies in the genre made that shift official. On Tuesday, Nov. 3, Jason Blum and James Wan retired the clunky "Blumhouse and Atomic Monster" handle and renamed their merged company Blumhouse Atomic , with Wan's statement leaning hard on finding "new voices." Two days later, Lionsgate and its management-company subsidiary 3 Arts Entertainment launched Render Road , a horror banner built to make films, series and digital work for audiences wherever they are already watching scary stuff, which in 2026 mostly means a phone.
Neither move happened in a vacuum. This was the year a 20-year-old YouTuber opened an A24 movie to $81.5 million, and a sketch comedian turned a sub-$1 million thriller into one of the biggest originals of the decade. Below: everything confirmed about Render Road and Blumhouse Atomic, the people running them, the numbers that started the land grab, and our honest read on whether the creator gold rush is a revolution or the start of a bubble.
Watch: Where This All Started
Render Road and Blumhouse Atomic don't have trailers of their own, so here are the two videos that explain why they exist. First, A24's trailer for Backrooms , released March 31:
And the one that started it: Kane Parsons' original "The Backrooms (Found Footage)," posted to his Kane Pixels channel on Jan. 7, 2022, and built in the free 3D program Blender.
The Details: What Render Road Actually Is
Render Road was first reported by Deadline as an exclusive and confirmed in a TheWrap report by Drew Taylor on the evening of Nov. 5. Here is what is on the record:
- Who runs it: 3 Arts partners Luke Maxwell and Will Rowbotham are leading the banner.
- What it makes: feature films, TV series and digital storytelling, developed, produced and financed in-house, for a wide range of platforms.
- Who it works with: emerging filmmakers alongside established ones, on its own projects and in partnership with other studios and production companies.
- The pitch: reaching horror fans where they are discovering and engaging with the genre. Translation: online first, theaters when it earns them.
No titles have been announced for the banner yet, and no budget ranges or distribution terms have been made public. What makes Render Road worth paying attention to is the roster 3 Arts already manages. The company represents Kane Parsons ( Backrooms ), Ian Tuason ( Undertone , and now the director of the next Paranormal Activity ) and Dylan Clark , who is directing the new Blair Witch for Lionsgate and Blumhouse Atomic as well as Portrait of God for Lionsgate, with Sam Raimi and Jordan Peele producing. In other words, the management company already has the talent. Render Road gives it a way to own the projects too.
The Details: What Changed at Blumhouse Atomic
The rename is less dramatic than it sounds, but the numbers attached to it are not. Blumhouse and Wan's Atomic Monster first went public with merger talks in November 2022 and closed the deal on Jan. 2, 2024. As of this week, Blumhouse Atomic is the corporate name for the combined company, while Blumhouse and Atomic Monster carry on as separate production labels with their own creative teams, according to TheWrap's Umberto Gonzalez.
Blum called the new name a "natural evolution" of what the two built together. Wan's line is the one the industry heard: "The future of horror comes from new voices." He name-checked Kane Parsons, Curry Barker, Josh Giuliano and Dylan Clark as filmmakers he is working with. The company also pointed to Sam Zimmerman, hired earlier this year as senior vice president of development and acquisitions to oversee genre features, including movies that cost under $5 million, plus a first-look deal with Divide/Conquer signed in late 2025.
The 2027 film slate is stacked: River , The Revenge of La Llorona , The Exorcist: Martyrs , Curry Barker's Anything But Ghosts , Paranormal Activity , Molepeople , Blair Witch , Sleepover and Seasons. Beyond movies, there is USA Network's The Rainmaker , Prime Video's Scarpetta , the game Grave Seasons , a Broadway version of Paranormal Activity and Halloween Horror Nights tie-ins.
Who's Behind It
James Wan is the reason the word "franchise" sits so comfortably next to "horror." He co-created Saw with Leigh Whannell, then built Insidious and The Conjuring into two of the genre's sturdiest brands through Atomic Monster. In 2025, Blumhouse picked up the rights to future Saw projects, which put Wan back with the series he started. Lionsgate keeps its existing ownership and distribution rights.
Jason Blum perfected the micro-budget, wide-release model with Paranormal Activity , then scaled it with Get Out , Five Nights at Freddy's and M3GAN. Since the merger, the company has released Night Swim , M3GAN 2.0 , Five Nights at Freddy's 2 , Lee Cronin's The Mummy and Other Mommy , among others.
Lionsgate has its own horror pedigree. It inherited The Blair Witch Project through its purchase of Artisan, distributed Eli Roth's Hostel and rode Saw for two decades. Its upcoming slate includes a new Saw from director Mike P. Nelson and a remake of Magic , the 1978 ventriloquist chiller written by William Goldman, which Sam Raimi is directing from a script by his Send Help writers Mark Swift and Damian Shannon.
Photo: Sam Raimi via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license). Raimi is directing Lionsgate's Magic remake and producing Dylan Clark's Portrait of God.
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Raimi is the perfect patron saint for all of this. He made The Evil Dead with friends and borrowed money decades before "creator economy" was a phrase. There is even a Sam Raimi Horror Award running right now, offering $25,000 and distribution to an emerging filmmaker's short, with submissions closing Dec. 31, according to the Fearsome Fiction weekly roundup.
The Backstory: How YouTube Became Horror's Farm Team
The pipeline didn't appear overnight. Parsons posted his first Backrooms video at 16 and spent three years turning it into a web series that pulled in millions of subscribers on Kane Pixels. A24 put him in the director's chair, with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve starring, and the movie shot in Vancouver in the summer of 2025 under the working title Effigy.
Curry Barker came up through the sketch channel "that's a bad idea" with collaborator Cooper Tomlinson. His short "The Chair" caught a producer's eye in 2023, and his first feature, Milk & Serial , went up free on YouTube in August 2024. Obsession premiered at TIFF's Midnight Madness on Sept. 5, 2025, where Focus Features paid a reported $14 million to $15 million, said to be a festival record for a genre film. Blumhouse came aboard as an executive producer after the premiere, which is how Blum and Wan ended up with a piece of the year's biggest surprise.
Ian Tuason took a different road. Undertone started life as a radio play, was shot in his own childhood home in Toronto, and won an audience award at Fantasia in July 2025 before A24 bought it. Its success helped land him the job of steering Paranormal Activity back to its original house.
And the list keeps growing. Per a TheWrap survey from Oct. 30, Warner Bros. has a Siren Head movie from Trevor Henderson with Zach Cregger producing, Amazon MGM has Alex Kister's Mandela Catalogue , Blumhouse has MatPat's Amanda the Adventurer , and Mark Fischbach's self-financed Iron Lung reportedly made about $50 million in theaters.
By the Numbers
- Obsession : made for $750,000 or less, per Barker. Opened in third place with $17.2 million on May 15, then grew in weekends two and three ($24 million, then $27.4 million). Worldwide gross topped $505 million by early September per Box Office Mojo, making it Focus Features' biggest film ever. 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, A- CinemaScore.
- Backrooms : budget under $10 million. Opened May 29 to $81.5 million domestic and $118 million worldwide, A24's biggest debut ever, and reached roughly $402 million worldwide. 86% on Rotten Tomatoes. Parsons became the youngest director to open a film at No. 1 in North America.
- Undertone : a $500,000 budget, a $9.34 million opening against a roughly $7 million projection, and about $21.6 million worldwide.
- Blumhouse Atomic overall: more than $2.5 billion worldwide since the merger against combined budgets under $330 million, over $1 billion in each of 2025 and 2026, and nearly $1.3 billion from 2026 releases that cost less than $70 million combined.
Sit with that last stat. Blumhouse Atomic's 2026 movies grossed roughly 18 times what they cost to make. No other corner of Hollywood can say that right now, and a big share of it came from two filmmakers who were posting videos for free a few years ago.
Analysis: What This Really Means
The scouting system has changed for good. For decades, the path for horror filmmakers ran through festivals, short-film circuits and the occasional viral trailer. YouTube flips that. A creator shows up with a tested premise, a built-in audience and years of proof that they can hold attention, which is exactly what a marketing department wants. Render Road exists because Lionsgate looked at 3 Arts' client list and realized it was renting talent it could be developing from day one.
The rename is a flag in the ground. Dropping "Monster" from the corporate name is tidy branding, but pairing it with a box office scorecard and a speech about new voices is a message to every creator with a horror channel: we've done this twice in a year, come to us first. Hiring an executive specifically to chase sub-$5 million features says the same thing.
History says booms overheat. We've seen this movie. The Blair Witch Project in 1999 kicked off a wave of cheap found-footage imitators, most forgotten. Paranormal Activity did it again a decade later and ran its own franchise into diminishing returns. The same risk is here. Undertone is the warning label: a strong opening, then a C CinemaScore and steep drops, ending near $21.6 million. That's still a big profit on $500,000, but it's a reminder that a viral concept isn't the same as a crowd-pleaser. Not every viral channel is going to produce a Backrooms.
The other risk is sanding off the weird. What made Backrooms and Obsession work was that nobody told their creators "no" for years. The more money and notes flow in, the more pressure there is to turn online oddities into safe four-quadrant products. The banners that win will be the ones that protect a creator's voice instead of absorbing it into another IP machine. Lionsgate's own track record with Saw (a new installment every Halloween from 2004 to 2010) is something to watch on that front.
The good news for fans: more doors are open for strange, cheap, original horror than at any point since the late '70s. If even a third of these creator projects keep their teeth, 2027 and 2028 are going to be very fun.
What We Still Don't Know
- Render Road's first projects, and whether Parsons, Tuason or Clark will make anything under the banner itself.
- Whether Render Road's "digital storytelling" means original YouTube series, games or something else entirely.
- How Lionsgate and Blumhouse Atomic split the spoils on shared titles like Blair Witch , now that both are courting the same creators.
- Release dates for most of Blumhouse Atomic's 2027 slate. The confirmed one: Paranormal Activity on Oct. 22, 2027.
Bottom Line
Horror's biggest companies have stopped treating YouTube as a gimmick and started treating it as their talent pipeline. Render Road and Blumhouse Atomic are the same bet from two angles: whoever signs the next Parsons or Barker first wins the next five years of the genre. The question is whether the money helps these creators get weirder or makes them play it safe.
Your turn: which horror YouTuber should get a studio deal next? Tell us in the comments.
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Header photo: James Wan via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added.
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