If you were perhaps among the many thay might have gotten shut out seeing THE MANDOLORIAN AND GORGU this weekend–and depending upon how rigid one’s preferences on screen type and time are that’s always a possibility–you might have been among those who “settled” for leftovers in your favorite multiplex. That’s a strategy many releases that aren’t quite blockbusters or tentpoles use to get a second crack at getting whole. Rarely does that strategy work to projections. And almost never has it worked to the extent we saw with one that VARIETY’s Rebecca Rubin gushed over yesterday:
“Obsession” is, well, the obsession of the box office. That’s after the low-budget horror film earned $22 million from 2,655 North American theaters in its second weekend and a projected $28.2 million through the Memorial Day holiday. Those ticket sales are 30% above its debut (an impressive $17.2 million from 2,615 cinemas) – a virtually unprecedented increase for a movie that was already in wide release. It’s especially uncommon for horror, a genre that’s notorious for falling sharply after opening weekend.
And that’s on the heels of the accomplishment that FORBES’ busy beaver Paul Tassi reported on earlier last week:
While Obsession, the highly-scored horror movie, landed third place for its opening weekend at the box office, already a win earning many multiples of its budget, by Monday, it set another record. One we have not seen since 2009, when another horror movie did the same thing. Obsession is the cheapest movie to top the box office in 17 years, word-of-mouth spreading so that it beat out the likes of blockbusters Michael, The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Mortal Kombat II, earning $2.9 million.
How does something like that happen in a world where failure and underperformance is almost always the order of the day? For one, as THE WAKEUP’s Sean McNulty noted in his earlier-than-usual newsletter yesterday as an almost predictable holiday weekend rainstorm ruined his Jersey shore getaway, there are these telling performance indicators:
- 75% of opening night audiences were 18-34s, and it had an A- CinemaScore — there’s nothing quite like delivering a hit built for, and then embraced by the core moviegoing demographic.
- It also did great midweek business, ranking #1 each day before Grogu came in Thursday night.
- Pic was shot for just $775k
, but FOCUS bought global (ex. NZ, France and Russia) for $15M out of TIFF, so this movie is already in profit on all spends.
Having all of this going for it just as thousands of college students are returning home for the summer in anticipation of a holiday weekend and likely not yet settled into a summer job and having to deal with high school friends even likelier to still be stuck with classes is a recipe that I’m honestly surprised other films haven’t attempted more often. It also didn’t hurt that the movie comes from a coupla guys who are expeirenced with the concepts of virality and cost-effectiveness, as SCREEN RANT’s resident Moneyball expert Brennan Klein noted in his accolodes which dropped yesterday:
2026’s Obsession, which is the feature debut of Internet sketch comedian Curry Barker, is a new horror movie co-produced by Blumhouse Productions and distributed in the United States by Focus Features. The horror movie follows a young man named Bear (Michael Johnston) wishing that his longtime crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette) to love him more than anyone else in the world, which has disastrous consequences.
Jason Blum is someone we’ve mused about previously, and so long as he avoids reboots and game shows he’s as reliable a supplier who has a pulse accurately and squarely on America’s movie fans as anyone doing so may have these days. Barker appears to be the Gen Z version of Blum and obvious disciple assuming his Wikipedia is even remotely accurate:
Barker… began making short films at a young age and later moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in entertainment. Barker initially gained recognition as part of the YouTube sketch comedy duo “That’s a Bad Idea” with Cooper Tomlinson, creating viral comedy and horror shorts that blended humor with unsettling themes. Barker made his feature directorial debut with the found footage horror film Milk & Serial (2024), which became a viral sensation on YouTube despite a microbudget of $800 .
Those are the kind of numbers that can make executives and financiers do spit-takes, especially after McNulty went through the math on how everyone’s favorite outer galaxy bad ass and little blue bald traveling companion fared:
Mandalorian & Grogu: $82M ($145M global)
- So . . . pretty much spot on with expectations here for DISNEY.
- Again, this is a spin-off pic based on a streaming show — judging it against late 2010s SW trilogy pics is unfair.
- Solo opened close to this at $84M (not adjusted for inflation) with a . . . far different creative reaction (plus 2x the budget) and in a far different time for the franchise.
- BASICALLY: This opened fine, and we’ll see how it goes.
- At about a $150M budget, factoring CA tax credits (the industry number stands at $165M), this will work out to a decent piece of business if it can 3x+ the opening.
One can spin these kind of results with a somewhat clear conscience as being decent, and certainly the fact that it was far and away the most popular offering of the de facto summer kickoff weekend is headline and clickbait-worthy. But as Miguel Fernandez of the franchise’s watchdog STAR WARS NEWS NET dug up last March, Disney still has a bit of a road ahead of them:
The California Film Commission revealed today that a total of 51 films will receive tax credits to shoot in California. The list, published on their website, included the upcoming Star Wars film The Mandalorian and Grogu. We had already learned last year that this would be the case, and that the tax credit would be near $20M. But the list also revealed that the Jon Favreau-directed film had a $166.438M production budget after shooting for 92 days, between late June and late November last year.
To be fair, as noted by several sources. that’s a substantially smaller nut than such earlier disappointments as THE LAST JEDI and THE RISE OF SKYWALKER had to cover. But toss an estimated $100-$150 million onto the pyre that paid for all of those special Burger King menu items and tzatchkes and that means that this coming weekend–ahead of the next alleged summer tentpole MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE–will need once again to be pretty darn prolific. And OBSESSION is still around as a rapidly mushrooming rolling stone that has now made its way even into my concept of zeitgeist.
As Gorgu itself might muse: Work, your is cut out for you. Yessss.”.
Until next time…