Eli Roth Launches Horror Section, Releases 'Ice Cream Man' Solo
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- Borderlands' $120 million budget produced a PG-13 film that "belonged to nobody," per Roth, after studio executives pushed for cuts and the 2024 video-game adaptation bombed with critics and audiences
- Ice Cream Man opens Aug. 7 unrated — Roth's first — sparing him MPAA fights over scenes of children vivisecting adults, made for $5.5 million via foreign pre-sales and Canadian tax credits (it shot in Canada)
- The Horror Section, founded by Roth in 2025, plans two to four theatrical horror releases a year on roughly 45-day windows, with strip-club slasher "Stiletto" following this fall and "Don't Go in That House, Bitch!" teaming Roth with Snoop Dogg in production
- CEO Jon Schnaars said the company set the finances so "the floor is very high" — Roth projects profit at $6–8 million domestic, an amount he expects home entertainment to roughly match
- Roth's IP argument targets a streaming-era shift: novelists own their work, he says, but "when a movie goes on Netflix, you're not getting any money," motivating him to retain ownership instead of selling scripts for one-time studio fees
Why it matters: Roth is testing whether unfiltered horror can survive theatrically without a studio's four-quadrant compromise — and his $5.5M Ice Cream Man needs only $6–8M domestic to turn a profit, a break-even ratio no $120M tentpole can match. If the model holds, it would prove mid-budget horror can fund itself off foreign pre-sales and tax credits while keeping underlying IP with the filmmaker.
