Blumhouse Just Signed James Tynion IV, and Exquisite Corpses Is the First Thing They’re Making

Three days after Jason Blum and James Wan put a new name on the door, Blumhouse Atomic has signed its first big writer under it. The company has entered a first-look deal with Tiny Onion, James Tynion IV’s production house, covering his work across film, television and animation, The Hollywood Reporter reported Friday. The first project out of the gate is Exquisite Corpses, the serial-killer battle royale comic Tynion created with artist Michael Walsh, which Blumhouse will develop as both a live-action film and an animated project.

A quick note on what’s actually new here, since the headlines are blurring it. The Exquisite Corpses movie was announced in January, when Lyrical Media and Tiny Onion said they were developing it and packaging it with talent. What happened Friday is that Blumhouse joined that project as a partner and signed on for everything else Tynion makes. The comic hasn’t changed hands. It’s gained a studio.

How they got here

The connection is Something Is Killing the Children. Blumhouse optioned Tynion’s BOOM! Studios series for film and animation last year, with Tynion producing, and Craig Zobel recently came on to direct the movie. Blum said in the announcement that Tynion had been a valued partner on that project and that expanding the relationship was the natural next step. Tynion’s version was warmer: he said walking into the Blumhouse offices felt like coming home. Jon Watts, Shaun S. Sutton, Ryan Turek, Adam Yoelin and Mette Norkjaer will executive produce Corpses.

If you haven’t read it, the premise is a pitch meeting in one sentence: every five years on Halloween, the richest families in America drop a dozen killers into a small town in Maine and bet on who walks out. Each issue brings in a different guest creator to handle a different killer, which is why the book reads like an anthology and a tournament at the same time. Image launched it in May 2025 with a 60-page first issue, and it has now passed a million copies in eighteen months, the biggest original-IP comic launch of last year. Three spinoff miniseries, Rascal Randy, Fox Mask Killer and Lone Gunman, a Book of the Dead anthology and a trading card game have followed. Walsh, incidentally, is the same artist DC just handed a horror-leaning Jonah Hex run, which we flagged back in August when Marvel cleared a whole Wednesday for its Midnight books.

The pipeline

Tynion founded Tiny Onion in early 2024 with money from Lyrical Media specifically so he’d have a seat at the table when his comics got adapted, rather than selling options and waiting. Not quite three years later the company has Exquisite Corpses and Room Service in development with Lyrical, Something Is Killing the Children with Blumhouse, an adult-animated version of The Woods, and now a standing deal with the most prolific horror studio in the business. The Department of Truth and The Nice House on the Lake are still out there.

The bigger picture is that horror comics have quietly become one of the more reliable adaptation pipelines in Hollywood, and Blumhouse is now the studio most invested in them. This deal is the company saying so out loud.

Sources: The Hollywood Reporter (Nov. 6, 2026); Bloody Disgusting; Dread Central; Tiny Onion newsletter; Deadline (Jan. 2026).