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Last year, Eli Roth decided to take matters into his own hands.
After his experience on Lionsgate’s $120 million video game adaptation, Borderlands (2024), went awry, the filmmaker launched his own soup-to-nuts company, The Horror Section, to bypass the studio system entirely. Together with his partners, Roth aims to shepherd genre films from development through release without forcing filmmakers to navigate layers of studio oversight and executive mandates that so often shape creative decisions.
The Horror Section’s inaugural release is Roth’s unrated splatterfest known as Ice Cream Man, which opens wide through Iconic Events Releasing on Aug. 7. Throughout his career, Roth has had to pull some of his punches in response to MPA-driven studio notes and exhibitors’ longstanding preference to avoid anything that exceeds an R-rating. But one recent horror franchise shattered that convention, opening the floodgates for more unrated theatrical releases like Ice Cream Man.
“There is a [theatrical] audience for the fully unhinged unrated movie with full-on gore,” Roth tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Once Terrifier 3 opened to around $20 million, all of a sudden, AMC, Regal, Cinemark and all the chains said, ‘Yeah, we will play an unrated movie.’”
