STRATEGY

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photos: Blumhouse

It’s been a frighteningly good year for Blumhouse Atomic Monster, the film production company behind horror franchises such as Insidious and The Black Phone. It also brought theatergoers the summer horror hits Obsession and Backrooms, which led the way toward Blumhouse’s 2026 slate of movies surpassing $1 billion in box office revenue by August.

For Blumhouse Atomic Monster brass like CFO Josh Small, though, the real horror show would be if corporate suits mandated results and held creators to firm metrics.

Blumhouse’s successful script includes regular strategic planning to help ensure it hits earning targets, Small told CFO Brew. However, the growth goals do not drive moviemaking. The company’s leaders instead focus on creating the conditions for moviemaking magic to happen.

“A lot of what we do as planning professionals, or finance professionals, or strategy professionals, is about…setting the groundwork, making sure the soil is as best as it can be for the right things to happen,” Small said.

Film production, like other creative industries, isn’t about producing widgets en masse (a horror movie factory would be an OSHA nightmare, anyway). That’s not to say Blumhouse doesn’t measure performance or track progress, he clarified. Rather, it relies more on qualitative, “soft” measurements.

How movie production is like portfolio management.—AZ

      

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Finance used to wait in line for engineering. Not anymore. New AI tools let finance leaders build workflow automations and real-time dashboards, plus agents that do real work, sometimes with version control, just like engineers.

Introducing…the finance engineer, the finance answer to the go-to-market engineer and a role built for lean, high-leverage teams.

Since finance runs on auditability, every AI-assisted decision needs a trail anyone can follow. AI can speed up the work, but people still own the result. Hence the name Traceable.

Traceable by Chargebee is a virtual summit on Nov. 18 for senior finance leaders from CFOs to controllers to discuss the AI mandate for finance.

You can expect candid show-and-tell sessions on the agentic systems and automations teams have already shipped, plus honest notes on what building the future of enterprise finance has taught them.

Save your seat.

EARNINGS

Mario Tama/Getty Images

As a general rule, when a company cuts its workforce by 6% right before an earnings report, it’s typically not a great look.

That general rule held true for Netflix, which reported Q3 earnings on October 20 after shedding around 1,000 jobs the week before—its largest cuts since 2022, according to The Wall Street Journal. A day after that workforce reduction announcement, the company also said its former content chief, Bela Bajaria, who had been with Netflix for a decade, was leaving.

That was the backdrop heading into the streaming service’s third-quarter earnings release.

For Q3 2026, Netflix posted $12.9 billion in revenue, a 12% climb from the same period last year. Sounds fine, until you learn that climb was the company’s lowest quarterly revenue growth in three years.

The company also adjusted its 2026 full-year forecast; it now expects $51.1 billion in revenue. Though that figure marks a 13% increase from the prior year, it’s on the lower end of Netflix’s previously forecast $51 to $51.4 billion range. It’s also below the $51.2 billion that Wall Street expected.

The earnings report did little to allay investor concerns, one analyst said.—NP

      

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CYBERSECURITY

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Adobe Stock

TL;DR: If “PHP” was popping up on your feed last week, you’re not alone. It’s all anyone can talk about as websites and apps around the world (including plenty you use) race to update after cybersecurity researchers discovered two flaws in PHP, the coding language that runs most of the internet. It’s why you may have noticed some sites go dark at unexpected times in the past few days.

What happened: Your company’s CTO could probably use your thoughts and prayers right now—one said he didn’t sleep for days after the flaws leaked last Tuesday. PHP developers released an emergency fix on Wednesday for the two flaws, which could let hackers take over a website without needing a password. Amazon also found hackers trying to exploit the flaws four days before the fix was out, and urged sites to update immediately. No breaches have been confirmed so far—although attempts to exploit the bug jumped from thousands before the announcement to millions by Wednesday night, per Cloudflare’s CEO.

Though they only recently disclosed this to the public, researchers at OpenAI and two security firms found the bugs over the summer using AI. A limited version of the problem was actually flagged in 2024 but was brushed off as too hard to exploit—a moot point now given AI’s rapid progress.

What exactly is PHP? It’s the programming language behind roughly 70% of websites, so a flaw in PHP leaves a lot of the digital world vulnerable (including sites with sensitive information, like government portals and online stores). PHP largely relies on volunteers to help maintain it (including this one man who is now being hailed as the unsung hero of the internet).

If a site or app you use was down last week, this may be why, Tech Brew says.—LC

      

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market forces

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top finance reads.

Stat: 80,000. That’s how many cell towers SpaceX is reportedly looking to buy across the US. The deal would help the company become the fourth nationwide wireless carrier. (Bloomberg)

Quote: “I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the industry’s ability this year to raise yields and pass through much of the increase in fuel prices. So it’s possible that airlines will continue to focus on yields at the expense of load factor and that alone could get us to double-digit margins next year.”—Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, on the company’s earnings call last week (CNBC)

Read: Mercedes spent $10 million to develop an 11-year-old kid into a Formula 1 champion. Now Kimi Antonelli is 20 and may have become the youngest F1 champion if he won in Austin on Sunday. (WSJ)

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