The box office is having a moment, and I mean a real one. As I said last week, what makes […]
The box office is having a moment, and I mean a real one. As I said last week, what makes this stretch so remarkable isn’t just the numbers, it’s the variety. Studios live in fear of overlap, and right now there isn’t any. Every film out there has its own audience and its own lane, and they’re almost all winning for it.
Obviously, when you’ve got several major hits competing, the ones that hurt the most are the ones with the biggest budgets. Even if they have a solid opening, the number can look disappointing compared to what it might have done in a less crowded marketplace.
Masters of the Universe is the first actual casualty of that crowded box office. The film stars Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Adam/He-Man, alongside Idris Elba, Camila Mendes, Alison Brie, and Jared Leto as Skeletor, directed by Travis Knight. Personally, I thought the marketing was atrocious – and not just because the posters are incredibly ugly and generic. The bigger problem is that the campaign never seemed to know who it was talking to. The core audience for this movie is adults who grew up on the original cartoon. Nostalgia junkies. Toy collectors. Comic book nerds. That’s your base, and that base was going to show up regardless. But if you’re spending $170 million – $200 million, you need to go beyond your base, and the marketing didn’t do that either. It wasn’t targeting kids, and honestly, I’m not sure kids even care about He-Man in 2026. There is a newer cartoon, but I’d wager it’s mostly adults watching that too. So what you’re really left with is a movie that skews heavily toward adult males, probably in their thirties and forties, and not a lot of them are dragging their families along for a He-Man movie on a crowded weekend. That’s an incredibly narrow audience for a $200 million bet. The reviews were solid, but by the time word got out, the momentum was already gone. If you weren’t a die-hard, you were probably seeing Obsession instead.
Something else a lot of people don’t like to talk about: when you see that Amazon logo, you assume it’s going to be on streaming. I think it’s a deterrent. You’re mentally filing Masters of the Universe away as a streaming watch. The film reportedly cost $170 million-$200 million to produce, and opening at around $31 million is pretty rough, even though the number sounds big. To truly break even, a film like this probably needs north of $500 million globally. It’s technically the first flop of this run, which is unfortunate, especially for fans who wanted to see a franchise get going. That said, Jared Leto‘s Skeletor is unbelievable in the role, and Nicholas Galitzine is perfectly cast as He-Man. I wish it had done better. And look, it is Amazon, so it’ll do fine on streaming. If fans need some hope, a lot of these streamers would pay north of $80 million for first-window streaming rights alone. Amazon isn’t hurting. If anything, maybe we get a series out of it?
Now, Backrooms shattered records with $81 million in its opening weekend – one of the biggest horror debuts ever. This weekend, it landed around $26 million in its second frame, a drop of roughly 67%, which I predicted on Twitter earlier this week. I called a 70–75% drop and hit it right on the nose. What’s important to understand is that this drop isn’t bad. It’s not embarrassing. It just means that $81 million was front-loaded, and a wave of Gen Z kids who grew up on the lore all showed up opening weekend, treating it like an event. Now that they’ve all seen it, it’s normalizing, and that’s exactly what you’d expect. The B– CinemaScore always told that story. Still phenomenal for a film that cost under $10 million to make. Oh, it’s also worth noting that Backrooms has officially surpassed $200 million globally ($212 million) and is A24’s highest-grossing movie of all time.
But the real story here is Obsession. It opened to $17 million on a budget of under a million dollars, and it has since crossed $116 million domestically. This weekend, it’s looking at around $25.6 million, a drop of just 7% from last weekend. It continues to defy every expectation and keep growing; it currently sits at $152 million domestically. It holds a 94% score from both critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes and an A- CinemaScore, which are extraordinarily high metrics for a horror film. Obsession is the word-of-mouth champion of the year. It’s unstoppable. It’s going to stay in theaters a long, long time.
And at the center of all of it is Inde Navarrette. Everything you’re reading about this movie eventually comes back to her performance. The social media response has been overwhelming, and in a year that has already rewarded horror performances at the awards level, she deserves to be in that conversation. I want to see her nominated. She absolutely deserves it. Whether she wins is another story, but I hope Focus Features campaigns hard for her. She’s that good.
Also this week, Scary Movie. I predicted a $50 million opening months ago and was screaming about how big it would be. It opened to $56 million, a franchise record. I nailed it. Not to sound arrogant, but I’ve been doing this a long time, and it makes me genuinely happy when I’m right, especially when I’m pushing back against a bunch of pundits who look at numbers and marketing spends and make estimates that don’t mean anything. You have to know your audience. You have to feel it. And Scary Movie nailed its audience. The marketing did everything right, and it’s being rewarded for it. It’s a massive hit.
Unfortunately, the movie itself isn’t great, which is kind of a bummer. But maybe they’ll get the next one right. No matter what, what we’re seeing across the board is a huge horror moment at the box office, and that’s something worth celebrating.
Now, next weekend is a different story. Steven Spielberg‘s Disclosure Day opens June 12 with a $115 million budget, starring Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Colman Domingo. That’s a serious movie dropping into a crazed marketplace, and Spielberg should probably be a little nervous. This box office run can be ruthless to blockbusters, and Masters of the Universe just found that out the hard way. Disclosure Day at least has no direct competition in its genre, which helps.
Also opening June 12 is The Furious, Lionsgate’s ultra-violent martial arts thriller, opening the same weekend as Disclosure Day. But these are completely different audiences. It’s a brutal, bone-snapping R-rated action film – the kind that draws comparisons to John Wick and The Raid – and it’s entirely its own thing. It’s the black sheep of the weekend. Nothing else is like it, and that’s exactly why it’ll find its audience.
Look, I’ve been covering the box office for a long time, and I genuinely cannot remember a stretch like this. Horror is absolutely decimating everything in its path right now, and what makes it even more exciting is that it isn’t one kind of horror; you’ve got a YouTube phenomenon, a micro-budget slow-burn romance that became a cultural juggernaut, and a parody franchise that just reminded everyone why it existed in the first place. That’s not a coincidence. That’s audiences desperately wanting to go to the movies, and the industry finally giving them enough reasons to show up. Next weekend will be the real test. Disclosure Day is the first true wild card, and if Spielberg delivers, this summer could go from great to all-time. I’m hopeful. For the first time in a while, I’m genuinely, excitedly hopeful.
