Eli Roth is done with studios. On 7 August, his new film Ice Cream Man opens through The Horror Section, the independent genre label he founded in 2025, and the director says he financed the entire picture without a single studio dollar.

The pivot comes on the heels of Borderlands, the $120 million video game adaptation that Roth directed for a major studio. He told Variety that as the budget climbed, he felt the project drifting away from his punk-rock sensibility, with executives pushing cuts and tweaks aimed at securing a PG-13 rating. The finished film opened in 2024 to poor reception from both audiences and critics (Variety).

Ice Cream Man is a very different beast. Roth conceived it around the Pied Piper legend: ice cream truck music triggers a Pavlovian response in children, who then kill their parents and teachers and devour more frozen treats. The budget is $5.5 million, raised mostly through foreign pre-sales — meaning distribution rights sold territory by territory before filming began — and tax credits, with the shoot taking place in Canada (Variety).

The economics are modest and deliberate. Roth expects to spend a few million on marketing, leaning on cheaper digital ads and publicity stunts — he showed up at Comic-Con handing out sweets from a blood-spattered ice cream truck. He estimates the film turns profitable at $6 million to $8 million in theatrical grosses, since it should earn roughly the same again on home entertainment (Variety).

Jon Schnaars, CEO of The Horror Section, told Variety the film's financial floor is set high by its pre-sales structure, meaning it does not need a big domestic performance for the company to be well positioned. The label plans to release two to four horror films annually in theatres, keeping budgets low to preserve creative freedom. Every film gets a theatrical window of roughly 45 days before any further distribution (Variety).

After Ice Cream Man opens, the slate continues with Stiletto, a slasher set in strip clubs, arriving in the autumn. Then Roth goes into production on Don't Go in That House, Bitch!, a horror film that pairs him with Snoop Dogg (Variety).

Roth's reasons for cutting studios out go beyond creative control. He pointed to the shift in the business itself: decades ago, selling a script to a studio was fine because home video generated steady residual payments to creators. Streaming, he said, erased that income stream. He also questioned a structural imbalance — novelists like Stephen King own their creations outright, but screenwriters typically do not. By going independent, Roth retains ownership of his stories in perpetuity rather than selling a script and its underlying intellectual property for a one-time fee (Variety).

What makes the gambit notable is the gap it exposes. Borderlands cost $120 million and answered to a studio. Ice Cream Man cost $5.5 million and answers to no one. Roth is betting that the smaller number buys him the thing the bigger number took away.