In further advancing display technologies, especially for improved blue emitters, to engineer the bandgap of promising semiconductors such as hybrid perovskites is important. Present-day methods for tuning the bandgaps of perovskites, such as the incorporation of mixed halide anions, suffer drawbacks such as phase separation and difficulty in synthesis. Here we report a new 2D lead iodide perovskite that emits in the blue spectral region. We exploit an increased angular distortion of PbI 4 2− octahedra to widen the bandgap of 2D metal halide perovskites. We synthesized 2D lead iodide perovskites based on (4-Y-C 6 H 4 CH 2 NH 3 ) 2 PbI 4 (Y = H, F, Cl, Br, I) and substituted the halogen atoms with a −CF 3 group to create (4-CF 3 -C 6 H 4 CH 2 NH 3 ) 2 PbI 4 compounds. We observed that the CF 3 -substituted material exhibited a ∼0.16 eV larger bandgap than did the halogen-substituted materials. We used X-ray diffraction and density functional theory simulations and found that the blue shift can be assigned to the angular distortion of the PbI 4 2− lattice, a distortion traceable to repulsive intermolecular interactions between the trifluoromethyl groups on oppositely-arranged spacers. These results add a degree of freedom in tuning 2D perovskites to selected bandgaps for optoelectronic applications.