Blumhouse is mostly known for its low-budget, big box office horror hits like M3GAN, Five Nights at Freddy’s, the Insidious franchise and so much more. This weekend, they have Other Mommy coming out, a thriller about a little girl terrorized by an entity impersonating her mother. I thought it would be a good time to look at Blumhouse’s more family-friendly films, something the 8-year-old in Other Mommy could probably watch without needing therapy afterward. The live-action Jem and the Holograms immediately came to mind. Then I saw something in their filmography that shocked me. Blumhouse made a Benji movie.
When the heck did this happen?
Almost eight years ago, to be exact. I’m not sure how I missed this, but Blumhouse launched its all-new modern reboot of Benji on March 16, 2018, as a Netflix Original movie. I had no idea this even existed. If you’re under the age of 45, you probably don’t even know who Benji is.
The original Benji from the 1974 movie was played by Higgins, a shaggy, honey-brown mixed-breed rescue dog discovered at the Burbank Animal Shelter by legendary Hollywood animal handler Frank Inn.
Inn rescued Higgins from being euthanized and trained him for show business, believing the dog was a mix of miniature poodle, cocker spaniel and schnauzer. Higgins was already a television veteran by the time he became Benji, having played “Dog” on the 1960s sitcom Petticoat Junction for nearly 150 episodes. By the time director Joe Camp visited Inn’s ranch looking for a dog to star in his new movie, Higgins was technically retired. Camp spotted the older dog in the yard and apparently knew he had found his star.
Benji became Higgins’ final and most famous role, but the little rescue dog left behind a canine legacy. Higgins died in 1975, just a year after Benji was released, but his daughter Benjean stepped into the role for later movies including For the Love of Benji and Benji the Hunted. So the original Benji wasn’t some specially bred Hollywood star brought in for the cameras. He was a shelter dog who went from being at risk of euthanasia to becoming one of the most recognizable movie dogs of his era.
When Blumhouse Productions released its modern Benji reboot in 2018, it was a pretty unexpected move for a company best known for horror movies like Get Out and The Purge. The movie was distributed globally as a Netflix Original, but its connection to Blumhouse actually makes more sense when you look at how the project came together.
The film was written and directed by Brandon Camp, the son of Joe Camp, who created, wrote and directed the original Benji in 1974. That family connection brought the series back to the Camp family, while Blumhouse provided a production model that had a surprising amount in common with how the first movie was made.
Joe Camp had been rejected by the traditional Hollywood studio system when he was trying to make the original Benji, forcing him to raise the money independently and release the movie outside the studio system. Despite its tiny budget, the film became a massive box office success.
When Brandon Camp began developing a new Benji adventure, traditional studios wanted to make major changes to the formula, including having the dog talk. Instead, Camp partnered with Blumhouse, whose low-budget approach and reputation for giving filmmakers creative freedom allowed him to keep the dog silent and grounded in the spirit of his father’s movie.
Jason Blum has also long maintained that Blumhouse is an independent film studio rather than simply a horror company, pointing to productions such as Whiplash and The Normal Heart. Benji became the company’s first official move into family-oriented programming.
There was also a bigger reason for bringing Benji back at that particular moment. When the project was first greenlit in 2016, the filmmakers compared the new movie’s purpose to the original, which arrived during a period when Americans were exhausted by the Watergate scandal. The idea was that a new generation dealing with its own politically exhausting moment could use something genuinely warm and uplifting.
The resulting movie was made for approximately $6 million before being acquired by Netflix for more than $10 million as part of the streaming service’s push into family content. So yes, Blumhouse made a Benji movie, but it wasn’t quite as strange a pairing as it initially appeared. In many ways, the company was helping the Camp family make Benji the same way they had always wanted to make it.
After finding out Benji had a newer movie, I decided to watch it, and had a good, hard laugh over the kidnapping plot, which felt very on-brand for Blumhouse. I have a love/hate relationship with the studio. I so often want to love their movies, but sometimes really don’t like them. It’s not like I hated M3GAN 2.0. I just didn’t appreciate having to pay $18 for taking a two-hour nap.
The Benji reboot came as a pleasant surprise, but I have an affinity for dog movies. Leash-free Benji is a street dog who has managed to build himself a pretty good life without a human telling him what to do. That changes when Carter and Frankie, two kids with questionable decision-making skills, lure him home with a handful of stolen beef jerky.
Benji follows them, only to immediately run into their hardworking mother, who has absolutely no interest in adopting a shaggy freeloading stray.
Then the kids are kidnapped, and suddenly Benji has a reason to care. The police aren’t exactly covering themselves in glory, so the rescue mission falls to the one creature nobody would expect to take it on. With his incredible sense of smell and plenty of street smarts, Benji sets out to find Carter and Frankie, following the trail through the streets of New Orleans and straight into the middle of a very messy kidnapping operation. The bad guys may think they grabbed two helpless kids, but they clearly weren’t prepared for the world’s most determined stray dog to come looking for them.
See, I told you it was on-brand for Blumhouse. Bela, the little girl from Other Mommy, would definitely have a good time watching it when she’s not being tormented by the malevolent supernatural entity that lives in her home. I personally think it stands miles above Blumhouse’s other attempts at making kid-friendly cinema. There was that time back in 2010 when they made Dwayne Johnson put on a tutu for his humiliation ritual called The Tooth Fairy. And I already mentioned the near-unwatchable Jem and the Holograms.
Blumhouse hasn’t returned to Benji since the 2018 movie, and there hasn’t been another installment announced. That’s okay. The 2018 movie gives Benji a pretty satisfying ending. After saving the children, the stray finally gets what he never had before: a permanent, loving home with the family. There’s no cliffhanger or obvious setup for another adventure, just Benji finding the family he was looking for all along.
That’s the perfect ending. It also offers first-time viewers a gateway into the old 1970s version of the franchise, which totally holds up in 2026.
