CBS waited exactly one week after Stephen Colbert‘s farewell from The Late Show before publicly celebrating the savings. On Thursday, May 28, 2026, a CBS spokesperson issued an official statement praising the network’s new “time buy” arrangement with Byron Allen and quantifying what the cancellation has done for the bottom line.

“We’re proud to partner with Byron Allen on a new business and programming model for late night that proactively addresses a network daypart that was cost-prohibitive to continue,” the CBS statement said. “With this ‘time buy’ model, we have shifted an hour that was losing roughly $40 million annually to $15 million in profit, a $55 million swing.”

The framing read across coverage as a victory lap on a host who had just left the air, with The Daily Beast describing CBS as “relishing the money they saved by unceremoniously canceling his show.”

Colbert poked the bear for a year

Colbert’s relationship with CBS deteriorated publicly over the final ten months of his run.

In July 2025, three days before CBS announced the cancellation, Colbert called Paramount’s $16 million settlement with President Donald Trump a “big fat bribe” on his Monday monologue. “I don’t know if anything, anything, will repair my trust in this company,” he said. “But, just taking a stab at it, I’d say $16 million would help.”

On National Boss’s Day in October 2025, he opened with what he called a “David Ellison Appreciation Cam,” looking directly into the lens to tell Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, “I love you.” He winked and added, “That oughta buy us a couple more months.”

In February 2026, he told his audience that CBS lawyers had directly intervened to prevent him from airing an interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. “We were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert said. CBS pushed back the next day, saying the show “was not prohibited” from airing the interview and that Colbert had been “presented with legal guidance.” The disagreement was never publicly reconciled.

His May 21 finale drew 6.7 million viewers, the highest weeknight audience in The Late Show‘s 33-year history. The episode included a deliberate Vince Guaraldi Peanuts copyrighted-music gag designed to cost CBS one last licensing fee. The day after, Colbert resurfaced on Michigan public-access show Only in Monroe with Jack White, Steve Buscemi, Jeff Daniels, and Eminem. CBS issued copyright takedown notices on the viral reposts, then reversed course within 48 hours after public backlash.

Six days later, the $55 million statement landed.

How the deal works

The Allen arrangement explains the math.

Allen pays CBS $15 million per year for the 11:35 PM timeslot, covers all production costs for Comics Unleashed, and sells his own advertising. CBS collects guaranteed revenue regardless of how many viewers tune in. Allen also leases the 12:37 AM slot for his game show Funny You Should Ask.

Allen described his pitch to The Hollywood Reporter. “I said, ‘Let me put that show there and let me buy the time period. I can save you $30 million to $40 million.’ They said, ‘Brilliant idea, let’s do it.’” He told TheWrap the broader savings on production and marketing run “approximately $150 million-plus per year.”

The financial framing has been disputed since the cancellation. Jimmy Kimmel called the original $40 million annual loss figure “beyond nonsensical” last summer, and independent industry analyst Evan Shapiro has published a recent analysis estimating The Late Show was actually generating roughly $102 million in profit. CBS has never disclosed how the loss figure was calculated.

The ratings collapsed and CBS does not care

Comics Unleashed‘s premiere on Friday, May 22 drew 878,000 viewers across two half-hour episodes per Nielsen live-plus-same-day data. That is an 87% decline from Colbert’s finale and roughly a 67% drop from The Late Show‘s final-season average of 2.7 million.

For CBS, the ratings collapse is irrelevant. Allen’s $15 million fee is guaranteed regardless of audience. The decline only affects Allen Media Group’s ability to recoup its costs through ad sales.

That is precisely why CBS could issue the May 28 statement without hedging. The network has converted a money-losing variable into a fixed-revenue contract and removed the host who spent a year making them look bad on their own air. The “purely financial decision” framing from July 2025 now has a specific dollar figure attached to it.

Colbert had ten months to define the exit on his terms. CBS waited seven days and defined the aftermath on theirs.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming and tech, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• The Daily Beast (May 29, 2026), Owen Mason-Hill’s reporting on the CBS statement and the verified “$55 million swing” quote

• Hollywood Reporter (May 29, 2026), additional statement coverage and Byron Allen’s verified pitch quote

• TheWrap (May 23, 2026), Nielsen ratings data for Comics Unleashed‘s 878,000-viewer debut and Byron Allen’s verified “$150 million-plus” quote

• Daily Beast (July 2025), Jimmy Kimmel’s verified “snowball’s chance in hell” pushback on the original loss figure

• Evan Shapiro / Substack (May 2026), independent profitability analysis

• Fox News (October 17, 2025), Colbert’s verified National Boss’s Day “David Ellison Appreciation Cam” monologue

• AOL / LateNighter (February 17, 2026), CBS statement and Colbert’s verified on-air quotes about the James Talarico episode

• NPR (May 25, 2026), Colbert’s Only in Monroe appearance and the reversed CBS copyright takedowns

• PBS NewsHour and Yahoo News (July 2025), original cancellation coverage and Colbert’s verified “big fat bribe” monologue

Mark Hamill has never been shy about his feelings on how the Star Wars sequel trilogy handled Luke Skywalker. In The Hollywood Reporter‘s first Actor Roundtable of 2026, he revealed he pitched a brief reunion scene between Luke, Leia, and Han Solo during The Force Awakens, only to be shut down by writer-director J.J. Abrams.

When asked which living actor he would most like to work with, Hamill named Harrison Ford.

“Well, in the sequel trilogy, Harrison Ford, ‘cause I only had two cameos,” Hamill said. “I said, ‘Aren’t we going to have a moment where all 3 of us get together to raise the roof? It’ll only take 30 seconds.’ And JJ said, ‘Well, Mark, it’s not Luke’s story anymore.’ I said, ‘Star Wars wasn’t Obi Wan’s story but Alec Guinness had a crucial commitment, you know...’ Anyway, nobody listens to me.”

That moment fits a pattern Hamill has been quietly maintaining for nearly a decade. Throughout the sequel trilogy’s production and release, he repeatedly voiced his discomfort with the direction Rian Johnson took his character in The Last Jedi and, more broadly, with how little the new films seemed interested in honoring the original trio’s legacy.

“I fundamentally disagreed with every choice”

Hamill’s most famous criticism came during production of The Last Jedi. In Vanity Fair‘s May 2017 cover story, Hamill recounted confronting Johnson about Luke’s arc.

“I, at one point, had to say to Rian, ‘I pretty much fundamentally disagree with every choice you’ve made for this character. Now, having said that, I have gotten it off my chest, and my job now is to take what you’ve created and do my best to realize your vision.’”

He specifically took issue with Luke becoming a cynical, broken hermit who had abandoned the Jedi. Speaking to SFX magazine in April 2017 about the film’s first trailer, Hamill said, “As you know from the trailer, Luke says it’s time for the Jedi to end. When I read it I went ‘What?’. He was always the most optimistic character, who believed with all his heart and soul in what Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi taught him.”

In a December 2017 interview that went viral, Hamill went further. “I said to Rian, ‘Jedis don’t give up.’ I mean, even if [Luke] had a problem, he would maybe take a year to try and regroup, but if he made a mistake, he would try and right that wrong, so right there, we had a fundamental difference. But it’s not my story anymore, it’s somebody else’s story and Rian needed me to be a certain way to make the ending effective. That’s the crux of my problem. Luke would never say that. I’m sorry.”

In the same interview, Hamill coined a phrase that stuck. “This is the next generation of Star Wars. I almost had to think of Luke as another character. Maybe he’s ‘Jake Skywalker,’ he’s not my Luke Skywalker.”

The “Humbled Hamill” walk-back

After The Last Jedi released to a polarized fan response, Hamill walked back some of his public criticism. On December 26, 2017, he tweeted:

“I regret voicing my doubts & insecurities in public. Creative differences are a common element of any project but usually remain private. All I wanted was to make good movie. I got more than that- @rianjohnson made an all-time GREAT one! #HumbledHamill”

The hashtag became its own minor pop culture moment, and Hamill has generally been more measured in subsequent interviews. He has repeatedly emphasized his respect for Johnson personally even when his criticism of Luke’s arc has resurfaced.

He’s still revisiting it in 2025 and 2026

The pattern Hamill keeps returning to is consistent. In a June 2025 appearance on the Bullseye with Jesse Thorn podcast, he addressed the long-running narrative directly.

“The fact that I went public with my dissatisfaction with the motivation for Luke becoming a suicidal hermit might have colored things in a way that, maybe I should have kept that to myself. But I kept saying to Rian, ‘This would just make Luke double down even more,’ and he said, ‘Well, your class at the Jedi Academy were wiped out.’ I said, ‘Rian, I saw entire planets wiped out! If anything, Luke doubles down and hardens his resolve in the face of adversity.’”

He also defended Johnson personally. “Johnson is one of the most gifted directors I have ever worked with. He’s amiable, he’s fun on set, he’s smart, he made a great movie. I think the standoff between Kylo Ren — Adam Driver — and I at the end is so well-staged. I love Knives Out and Brick. He’s one of my favorite directors.”

The careful distinction Hamill keeps drawing is between Johnson the filmmaker, whom he respects, and the choices made about Luke, which he has never fully accepted.

The throughline

The pattern across nearly a decade of Hamill interviews is simple. He wanted Luke to have a more meaningful role in the new trilogy, whether it was reuniting with his old friends, staying true to his heroic nature, or getting a send-off that honored four decades of the character.

Instead, he was repeatedly told some version of “it’s not Luke’s story anymore.”

Hamill has been remarkably gracious about it publicly. He has not badmouthed Johnson, has not turned on Abrams, has not joined the sequel-bashing crowd that took his early comments as ammunition. But the consistency of his framing across 2017, 2018, 2025, and now 2026 makes clear that he has not changed his mind. The Luke Skywalker in the sequels was not his Luke Skywalker, and the original trio reunion the audience wanted was permanently lost the moment Abrams said no.

With Carrie Fisher gone since 2016, Ford uninterested in returning to the franchise, and all three characters now canonically dead within Star Wars continuity, that reunion is structurally impossible. Hamill is the only one of the three still able to talk about it, and he keeps talking about it because nobody else can.

The current state of the franchise lends his criticism additional weight. The Mandalorian and Grogu is in the middle of a soft theatrical run that has Disney and Lucasfilm pivoting toward Star Wars: Starfighter in 2027 for a fresh start. The decisions that drove Hamill’s frustration in 2015 and 2017 are now widely seen, even by Star Wars defenders, as contributing factors to the franchise’s current theatrical struggles.

Hamill himself probably did not expect to still be litigating Luke’s sequel arc a decade after The Force Awakens. But the audience keeps asking. And every time someone asks, he gives essentially the same answer he gave Abrams in 2014. It would have only taken 30 seconds.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming and tech, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• The Hollywood Reporter Actor Roundtable (January 2026), primary source for the 30-second reunion quote and the Alec Guinness comparison

• ScreenRant, GeekTyrant, SuperHeroHype, SFFGazette, and ComicBookMovie, January 2026 coverage of the THR roundtable

• Vanity Fair (May 2017), original “fundamentally disagree with every choice” quote

• SFX magazine (April 2017), Hamill’s “Luke says it’s time for the Jedi to end” reaction to the Last Jedi trailer

• Collider, GameSpot, and Slate (December 2017), the verified “Jake Skywalker” and “Jedis don’t give up” interview quotes

• Mark Hamill’s verified December 26, 2017 X post, “I regret voicing my doubts & insecurities”

• AOL and Entertainment Weekly (June 2025), Hamill’s Bullseye with Jesse Thorn podcast quotes, including the verified Johnson defense and the “I saw entire planets wiped out” exchange

• Variety (June 2017), Hamill’s “I got into trouble” walkback after the initial Vanity Fair quote

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow opens June 26, 2026, and the press tour for star Milly Alcock has spent the last several weeks generating exactly the kind of pre-release controversy that has sunk previous franchise tentpoles. The studio narrative has been that the backlash is coming from right-wing male critics and “Christian dads” hostile to a female-led superhero film.

Then on May 30, 2026, Grace Randolph, the longtime host of YouTube’s Beyond the Trailer and one of the most-followed female box office analysts in the entertainment commentary space, weighed in. And the studio narrative stopped working.

To understand why Randolph’s response landed so hard, you have to start with what Alcock actually said.

The Vanity Fair interview was sympathetic

In Vanity Fair, published in March 2026 alongside the Supergirl trailer, Alcock spoke about anticipating backlash for being a woman in a high-profile franchise role.

“It definitely made me aware that simply existing as a woman in that space is something that people comment on. We have become very comfortable having this weird ownership of women’s bodies,” Alcock said. “I can’t really stop them. I can only be myself.”

She added, “Of course I’m scared. Of course I want people to like me and the movie. But ultimately, it’s out of my control.”

The Vanity Fair comments drew some online pushback, but most of the criticism focused on the cycle the comments described rather than Alcock herself.

The Variety interview is what lit the fuse

The May 2026 Variety cover story shifted the tone significantly.

Asked about her preparation for Supergirl, Alcock revealed she had not watched Black Widow, Captain Marvel, or Wonder Woman before taking the role. “Which is probably not great,” she told Variety, jokingly adding, “I should just lie!”

She also pushed back at critics who had reacted to her Vanity Fair comments. “I didn’t even say ‘men’ — I said ‘people’! And they got so angry. I was like, ‘You’re proving my point. You’re proving my point!’”

Then came the line that drove the broader backlash. Asked about online critics, Alcock characterized them with a specific demographic shorthand.

“People whose profiles have no photo, who are burner accounts. Or someone’s name and then ‘Dad of four, Christian,’ which is hilarious to me. But I mean, whose opinion do you really care about? If you’re pissing the right kind of people off, you’re doing OK.”

That comment landed differently than the Vanity Fair framing. Mocking the demographic profile of critics by their religion and family status is the kind of statement that travels fast and stays attached to the speaker.

Within days, the “Christian dads” reference was the dominant frame in coverage of the film, and the studio’s narrative that Supergirl skepticism was coming from a fringe of trolls became harder to sustain because Alcock herself had just defined her critics by their faith and their family role.

The full set of Variety comments gave critics across the political spectrum something concrete to react to. The “probably not great” admission about not watching the female-led films before her own female-led role read as dismissive of the women who built the genre.

The “Dad of four, Christian” line read as picking a fight with a specific demographic. And the broader tone landed as the same kind of confrontational press posture that Rachel Zegler used during her Snow White press tour, before that film underperformed badly.

Then Grace Randolph weighed in

This is where the studio’s narrative started failing.

Randolph posted a multi-part response to the Alcock interview on her Beyond the Trailer YouTube channel. She is not a conservative critic, not part of the anti-DCU crowd, and has spent over a decade championing female-led superhero films. She is the demographic the film was theoretically built to please.

She said most of the same things the right-leaning critics were saying.

“I couldn’t believe this,” Randolph said. “If I were a publicist, I’d be like, ‘Stop talking for the love of God.’”

She called the Variety interview “rough” and the comments “not good.” She explicitly compared the situation to Zegler’s Snow White press tour, noting that by 2026, stars and studios should know certain framings damage a film before it opens regardless of the merits of the film itself.

On Alcock not watching the previous female-led superhero films, Randolph was unsparing. She said those comments were “really bad” and argued Alcock should have done her research. “Support your fellow ladies,” Randolph said. She argued Alcock should have framed herself as honored to follow in the footsteps of Gal Gadot, Scarlett Johansson, and Brie Larson rather than admitting she had not watched any of their films.

She also brought up The Marvels, which leaned hard into “girl power” marketing before bombing to a $46 million opening in 2023. Randolph’s warning was that turning a superhero film into an ideological campaign rather than an adventure story is a documented loss pattern, and Supergirl‘s marketing has been drifting in the same direction.

On the visual presentation, Randolph extended the criticism. She wondered openly whether Alcock had read the Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow comic she was photographed holding in promotional materials, calling that “concerning.” She compared the situation to Daisy Ridley and Kelly Marie Tran in Star Wars, who in her view “were not always presented the way they should have been.” Alcock has a full hair and makeup team, Randolph noted, and the character has always looked striking in the comics. She pointed to Patty Jenkins‘s 2017 Wonder Woman, with Zack Snyder‘s assistance, as the model.

She also flagged Alcock’s revelation that she does not wear the Supergirl suit as much as fans might expect, saying that risks the film feeling “less like a Supergirl movie” and “more like a girl power movie rather than a Supergirl movie.” She questioned how James Gunn approved that direction, given that Gunn has positioned himself as the comic-respecting steward of the new DC Universe.

“How on earth does this movie not look like this comic if you’re not going to adapt this comic to look like what made it special?” Randolph asked. “Why do it?”

The audience problem

The most pointed structural argument Randolph made was about who the film is targeting.

Barbie and Wonder Woman both succeeded as female-led films at least partly because their filmmakers understood they still needed to bring the male audience along. Greta Gerwig on Barbie and Patty Jenkins on Wonder Woman both threaded that needle deliberately. Randolph said Supergirl feels like it has been “written for women in a way that could make the audience smaller,” and that the one image of Alcock in what fans dubbed the “tinfoil-style outfit” may resonate with women and LGBTQ fans without connecting with the core superhero audience the film also needs.

That observation hits a structural fact about the genre. Every female-led superhero film in the modern era has had a male-majority audience, with most female moviegoers skipping them in favor of other options. Marketing decisions that narrow the target audience narrow the box office too.

Why Randolph’s pushback matters

Randolph’s criticism matters because it does not fit the studio’s preferred narrative.

She is a high-profile female critic, a longtime supporter of female-led superhero films, and someone who openly wants Supergirl to succeed. When a critic in that position lines up with broader audience concerns, the “it’s just trolls and Christian dads” framing collapses. The conversation becomes harder for the studio to control because the people doing the talking now include exactly the demographic the film was theoretically built to please.

The pressure is real. Box Office Theory projections cited by industry trades have Supergirl tracking for a domestic opening of $47 million to $65 million, with a full domestic run forecast at $107 million to $181 million. For a film with a reported $170 million budget plus marketing, those numbers put profitability in serious question.

The competitive calendar is brutal. Toy Story 5 opens June 19, one week before Supergirl, with $130 to $160 million tracking. Minions & Monsters opens July 1. Disney‘s live-action Moana opens July 10. Supergirl ranks ninth in Fandango‘s 2026 summer survey behind multiple family films.

DC Studios co-chairman Peter Safran has continued to back Alcock publicly, telling Variety he called her after an earlier round of backlash. He has also framed audience concerns as “mediocre movie fatigue” rather than superhero fatigue, arguing the film’s originality will carry it.

The framing problem

The bigger issue for Warner Bros. and DC Studios is the narrative trap they walked into. By preemptively positioning Supergirl skepticism as a function of right-wing misogyny, they made it impossible to engage with the kinds of criticism Randolph is now making. The legitimate concerns about preparation, marketing, comic accuracy, and audience targeting got bundled with the body-shaming and harassment Alcock has documented receiving. When a progressive female critic shows up making the same structural arguments as the right-leaning critics, the bundling collapses.

Whether the film actually delivers on June 26 is the question that ultimately decides this. But heading into release, the studio has lost the ability to credibly tell critics that the pushback is coming from a single ideological direction. The “Christian dads” line gave Supergirl skeptics something concrete to attach the broader critique to. Grace Randolph just made it impossible to dismiss the whole conversation as a partisan attack.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming and tech, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Grace Randolph on her Beyond the Trailer YouTube channel (May 30, 2026), original multi-part response to the Milly Alcock Variety interview, including the verified “Stop talking for the love of God,” “Support your fellow ladies,” “girl power movie rather than a Supergirl movie,” and “How on earth does this movie not look like this comic” quotes

• Variety (May 2026), Milly Alcock cover story including the verified “probably not great / I should just lie!” quote, the “I didn’t even say ‘men’ — I said ‘people’” follow-up, the “Dad of four, Christian” characterization of critics, and Peter Safran’s “mediocre movie fatigue” framing

• Vanity Fair (March 2026), Milly Alcock interview tied to the Supergirl trailer release, including the verified “weird ownership of women’s bodies” quote and the “Of course I’m scared” follow-up

• Box Office Theory projections cited by Washington Times, Dark Horizons, ComingSoon, GameRevolution, and Yahoo Entertainment, May 2026 tracking data on the $47-65 million domestic opening range and $107-181 million full domestic run

• Washington Times (May 26, 2026), industry analyst commentary including the Peter Safran phone call to Alcock and the Puck-sourced $170 million budget estimate

• Cosmic Book News (May 30, 2026), aggregated coverage of the Grace Randolph commentary as a secondary cross-reference

• Fandango 2026 summer movie anticipation survey rankings

• Variety and Warner Bros. press materials, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow cast, crew, plot, and June 26, 2026 release date

Hot Toys has released Series 2 of its Cosbi Ewok Plush Keychain Collection, expanding the popular Star Wars blind-box line with nine new characters from the forests of Endor. Geeky Sparkles has the full unboxing and review on the Clownfish TV Gaming YouTube channel.

The second wave continues the Cosbi format that made the Series 1 keychains a sleeper hit with Star Wars collectors in 2025: 6-inch plush figures with sculpted vinyl faces, velour hoods, soft fabric bodies, and felt weapon accessories, all clipped to a metal key ring with a character name tag.

Check out MORE from Hot Toys Here - https://linktr.ee/cosbabyofficial

Each plush comes packed in a blind box with a collector card identifying the character, and each box in a sealed case of eight contains a different Ewok with no duplicates.

What’s in the Series 2 assortment

Series 2 brings back franchise favorites while introducing several new characters from the deeper Endor lore. The standard lineup includes:

• Wicket, the future Ewok leader, equipped with his battle horn to summon the warriors of Endor

• Logray, the wise shaman, returning from Series 1 in a new pose

• Paploo, the sneaky scout known for stealing the Imperial speeder bike

• Teebo, one of Chief Chirpa’s most trusted warriors, armed with his iconic spear

• Rabin, the skilled hunter, a new addition to the Cosbi line

• Lumat, Chief Chirpa’s elder advisor and father to Nippet, with his signature bow

• Kaink, the legendary village mystic and Guardian of the Soul Trees

• Nho’Apakk, a steadfast Ewok warrior bringing extra Endor lore to the lineup

The ultra-rare mystery chase is Baby Nippet, the infant Ewok shown cozily tucked inside a woven basket. Baby Nippet pulls at odds of approximately 1 in 48, making it the most coveted figure in the set for collectors. The standard eight characters appear at 1-in-8 odds within each blind box.

How Series 2 compares to Series 1

Series 1, released in late 2025, included Wicket (Happy), Wicket (Anxious), Logray, Tokkat, Zephee, Kneesaa, Brethupp, and Chief Chirpa. Series 2 leans further into the deeper supporting cast of Bright Tree Village rather than repeating the most famous characters. Collectors trying to complete the full Cosbi Ewok roster across both series will end up with roughly 17 unique characters when both mystery chases (Series 1’s chase and Baby Nippet) are factored in.

The Cosbi format itself is a Hot Toys-developed style that combines plush bodies with stylized vinyl heads, sitting in the same general design family as Sonny Angel or Pop Mart blind-box collectibles but with full Star Wars licensing. The line has expanded across multiple properties including Grogu, The Mandalorian and Grogu characters, Dandadan, and the Star Wars Balloon Cosbi Bobble-Head Collection, all using the same blind-box format.

Geeky’s verdict

In her full written review, Geeky Sparkles rated the Series 2 keychains a 9.5 out of 10, calling them “soft, adorable, and well-made.” Her one minor criticism was that the felt weapons can be slightly flimsy and prone to folding, though she noted that’s an intentional design choice to prevent the accessories from catching on clothing or causing damage when worn.

The full video unboxing breaks down every Ewok she pulled, compares Series 2 to her existing Series 1 collection, and gives close-up looks at the build quality on the new characters.

Availability

The Hot Toys Cosbi Ewok Plush Keychain Collection Series 2 is shipping in Q2 to Q3 2026 through Hot Toys’ usual retail partners. The line is “available in selected markets only” per Hot Toys’ official product listings, with US distribution through specialty collectibles retailers including Pop Collectibles, Pop Culture Depot, Sunny Studio, and Hot Toys’ direct channels. Pricing varies by retailer but the case-of-eight sets are running approximately $150 to $300 depending on import fees and market.

For collectors who already locked in Series 1, Series 2 is an easy add. For new collectors, starting fresh with a Series 2 case is a strong entry point given the deeper Endor character roster.

Check out MORE from Hot Toys Here - https://linktr.ee/cosbabyofficial

Watch the full review

Geeky Sparkles’ complete unboxing and review video is live now on the Clownfish TV YouTube channel. The video walks through the entire case, shows each Ewok up close, and gives the kind of detailed look at the figures that the product photos don’t quite capture.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

Clownfish TV is your source for news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Hot Toys official product listing for the Cosbi Ewok Plush Keychain Collection Series 2 (PPLU114N), including character details, dimensions, and 1-in-48 chase odds

• Pop Collectibles, Sunny Studio, Pop Culture Depot, and Toys Fanzone retailer listings, confirming Series 2 character lineup, materials, and Q2-Q3 2026 release window

• Hot Toys press materials on the broader Cosbi line including Grogu, Mandalorian and Grogu, Star Wars Balloon Cosbi Bobble-Head Series 2, and Dandadan blind-box collectibles

Bluesky was supposed to be the civilized alternative to old Twitter. A place where people could escape the chaos of Elon Musk‘s X without the toxicity, harassment, or right-wing voices that many on the left found exhausting. Instead, for many users it has become a more insular version of Twitter circa 2017, complete with aggressive pile-ons, purity tests, and an ideological monoculture so concentrated that even its own progressive defenders are now publicly diagnosing the problem.

Two of the most pointed recent critiques have come not from conservatives or X loyalists, but from Mark Cuban, one of Bluesky’s most-financially-invested high-profile boosters, and James Ball, the Pulitzer-winning progressive British journalist whose data analysis sparked a Bluesky pile-on over Easter weekend that proved his own point.

The history

Bluesky began in 2019 as an internal research project at Twitter, initiated by then-CEO Jack Dorsey. The goal was to build a decentralized social network that would give users more control over their feeds and moderation. After Dorsey stepped down and Elon Musk acquired Twitter (rebranded as X), Bluesky spun out as its own company in 2021 with Jay Graber as CEO.

It launched to the public in a limited way in 2023 and saw explosive growth in late 2024 and early 2025, particularly after the U.S. election, as many left-leaning users and journalists migrated from X. Bluesky grew from 13 million users in October 2024 to 40.2 million by November 2025. The current registered user count is roughly 43 million, per TechCrunch. The platform runs no ads and has so far stayed largely free of the AI-generated slop that has taken over much of the open social web.

That part of the story is genuinely impressive. The engagement story is not.

The numbers tell the engagement story

Total user count is still climbing slowly. Active daily participation, however, has been moving in the opposite direction since early 2025.

According to market intelligence firm Similarweb, as reported by Forbes in late January 2026, Bluesky’s daily active users on mobile devices dropped 39.8% year-over-year as of October 2025. The platform peaked at roughly 6 million daily mobile users in March 2025 and fell to about 3.5 million by October.

The decline stands in stark contrast to its competitors over the same period. X dropped 13.3% YoY, a meaningful but much smaller decline. Meta’s Threads grew 53% in daily active users and eventually overtook X in mobile daily usage. Truth Social grew 32%.

Bluesky’s own internal posting numbers paint a similar picture. On February 28, 2025, Bluesky had more than 1 million unique daily posters. By early June 2025, that number had fallen below 670,000.

James Ball did the long math, and got brigaded for it

On Good Friday, April 3, 2026, the British journalist James Ball posted a thread examining Bluesky’s user data on his own Bluesky account. The chart he posted showed daily likers falling from 1.6 million a year earlier to roughly 1.1 million. His framing was direct. “The network is shrinking, not growing. It’s shrinking a lot.”

The reaction proved his point. The first post in his thread drew 870 replies and 1,044 quote posts. As Ball put it dryly in his Easter Sunday follow-up essay on his Substack, Techtris, “I made myself the main character of Bluesky. That’s never a good sign.”

In that follow-up, Ball laid out a longer and harder-to-dismiss analysis. Averaging Bluesky’s daily likers and daily posters by month, going back to the platform’s founding, the picture he saw was not ambiguous.

“In the first few days of April 2026, average daily posters had fallen to the level of September 2024, handing back everything the site had gained since Trump’s election win,” Ball wrote. “Absent that small spike [from the Grok nudifying scandal in January 2026], Bluesky has on average, since early 2025, been losing about 4% of likers and 5% of posters every month.”

Ball is not a right-wing critic looking for a “left-wing intolerance” hook. He explicitly headed off that framing in his piece. “I define myself as left-wing, even if others disagree: I want taxes to be higher, I want good public services, I want a generous welfare state, I want meaningful checks on corporate power.”

His structural argument is the part that should worry Bluesky most. The platform runs no ads and has no subscription model. It is being kept alive by investor money. “Investors don’t put much money into shrinking social networks,” Ball wrote. “Bluesky doesn’t have that luxury. It grows or it dies.”

Ball also acknowledged the cultural component directly. “Bluesky tends to gleefully chase off power users who dip their toes in the water. Let’s be clear: some prominently liberal of heterodox commentators entered Bluesky with incredibly obvious bad faith, their ‘left-wing intolerance’ articles already pre-written in their heads. Screw those guys. But Bluesky is a text-based social network. The people who are real freaks for posting opinions in writing all the time tend to be journalists. And journalists tend to have a following. The outright hostility to growing the tent a bit is probably one of Bluesky’s obstacles to growth.”

Ball noted what he called “the gleeful brigading of the victim of the day” and “certain Bluesky subcultures [that] enjoy brigading as a bloodsport, and regard high follower accounts as the most fun prey.”

He still uses Bluesky and wants it to survive. He just does not think the math supports the current trajectory.

Even Mark Cuban can’t defend the culture anymore

The other most damaging recent critique came in June 2025 from Mark Cuban, the billionaire investor and former Shark Tank star who had been one of the platform’s loudest cheerleaders.

Cuban was one of the highest-profile X-to-Bluesky converts in November 2024. His initial post on the platform set the tone of the migration. “Hello Less Hateful World.” He went further by financially backing Skylight, a video app built on Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol.

By June 8, 2025, his tone had completely shifted.

“The lack of diversity of thought here is really hurting usage,” Cuban wrote, linking to a Washington Post opinion piece headlined “The Bluesky bubble hurts liberals and their causes.”

His most pointed observation followed. “The replies on here may not be as racist as Twitter, but they damn sure are hateful. Talk AI: FU, AI sucks go away. Talk Business: Go away. Talk Healthcare: Crickets. Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist. We are forcing posts to X.”

He added that the culture had become punitive even for ideologically aligned users. “Even if you agree with 95% of what a person is saying on a topic, if there is one point that you might call out as being more of a gray area, they will call you a fascist etc.”

Cuban explicitly said he wanted Bluesky to succeed. “I want an alternative to Twitter to survive and thrive. I think it’s important for BS to grow as a way to offset or diminish the cultural and political impact that Twitter has. This is why I care.”

When one of the platform’s biggest financial backers and Ball, one of its most respected progressive journalist users, are publicly making the same diagnosis from completely different angles, that is a serious signal.

The CEO change and internal turmoil

In March 2026, Jay Graber stepped down as CEO and moved into the role of Chief Innovation Officer. Toni Schneider, former CEO of Automattic (the parent company of WordPress.com) and a partner at venture firm True Ventures, took over as interim CEO. Both Automattic and True Ventures are existing investors in Bluesky.

Graber framed the change as a matter of company maturity in her March 9, 2026 announcement blog post. “After several intense and incredible years building Bluesky from the ground up, I’ve decided to step back as CEO and transition to a new role as Bluesky’s Chief Innovation Officer.” She said the company now needed “a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution.”

Dorsey had already left the Bluesky board in May 2024 and has been notably quiet about the platform since. Reports suggest he grew disillusioned with how the platform evolved away from his original decentralized vision.

In the weeks after Graber’s transition, Bluesky closed a Series B funding round, bringing total disclosed funding to roughly $123 million. The company did not disclose an updated valuation. That funding round is meaningful in light of Ball’s diagnosis. Investors are still buying in, but the runway is finite.

Mark Hamill has had two pile-ons in 13 months

The dynamic Cuban and Ball described has played out repeatedly with some of Bluesky’s highest-profile users. Mark Hamill, the Star Wars actor and one of the platform’s most-followed celebrities, has been on the receiving end twice in just over a year.

In April 2025, Hamill promoted The King of Kings, the Angel Studios animated film in which he voices King Herod alongside Oscar Isaac as Jesus, Kenneth Branagh as Charles Dickens, Pierce Brosnan as Pontius Pilate, Forest Whitaker as Peter, Ben Kingsley as Caiaphas, and Uma Thurman as Catherine Dickens. The film was a commercial hit, grossing $83.5 million worldwide against a $25 million budget and becoming the highest-opening animated Biblical movie ever.

Hamill’s Bluesky promo post read, “Witness the glory of ‘the greatest story ever told’ all through the wide-eyed eyes of wonder of a small boy (& his cat). An amazing cast in an awesome family film for children of all ages!”

The backlash was immediate. Documented Bluesky replies included “Love you, Mark... but no. Religious nuts are already ruining our country. I prefer your other fantasy work,” “Hey Mark... were usually with ya on your VO gigs... but Angel Studios? I mean, have you read about them? These guys are bad news,” and “Teaching children about white jesus. Not cool bro.”

Within days, Hamill resumed posting more actively on X.

A year later, in May 2026, Hamill was at the center of a much bigger controversy, this one going in the opposite political direction. On the evening of Wednesday, May 7, 2026, he posted an AI-generated image on Bluesky depicting President Donald Trump lying in a shallow grave surrounded by daisies. The headstone read “Donald J. Trump 1946-2024,” and the words “If Only” were written across the bottom.

The caption read, in part, “If Only - He should live long enough to witness his inevitable devastating loss in the midterms, be held accountable for his unprecedented corruption, impeached, convicted & humiliated for his countless crimes. Long enough to realize he’ll be disgraced in the history books, forevermore.”

The post came roughly two weeks after a shooter opened fire outside the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. The White House response on X was direct.

“Mark Hamill is one sick individual. These Radical Left lunatics just can’t help themselves. This kind of rhetoric is exactly what has inspired three assassination attempts in two years against our President.”

By Thursday afternoon, Hamill had deleted the original post and issued a partial apology, also on Bluesky. “Accurate Edit for Clarity: ‘He should live long enough to... be held accountable for his... crimes.’ Actually, I was wishing him the opposite of dead, but apologize if you found the image inappropriate.”

The two Hamill episodes capture the asymmetry of Bluesky’s current moderation environment. In April 2025 he was dogpiled by his own users for promoting a religious movie they did not like. In May 2026 he posted content that drew sharp condemnation from outside the platform and required a public retraction.

The Bluesky team pushes back on the framing

Not everyone agrees with the “echo chamber” framing. TechCrunch, which had published the original reporting on Cuban’s criticism, ran a follow-up piece in June 2025 titled “Bluesky backlash misses the point,” arguing that Bluesky’s brand has become unfairly conflated with the broader AT Protocol network it spearheaded. The piece noted that over 500 interoperable third-party apps now run on the AT Protocol ecosystem, and that pigeon-holing the brand as “the liberal alternative to X” undersells the technical achievement of building a decentralized network at scale.

In his blog post taking over the CEO role, Schneider emphasized this broader ecosystem framing. “Bluesky has cracked a case that stumped the industry for years: How to create a social network that has the best of both worlds. The personal freedom and ownership of decentralized, with the simplicity and reach of centralized.”

The 2026 roadmap published by Bluesky’s head of product Alex Benzer in late January acknowledged the engagement problem head-on, promising improvements to the Discover feed, follower recommendations, real-time features, longer video uploads, and better thread creation tools.

Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino have predictably capitalized on the unrest. Musk has described Bluesky users as “a bunch of super judgy hall monitors.” Yaccarino has framed X as “the true global town square.” Both characterizations are self-serving, but the underlying data on engagement and culture criticism is real, and now coming from prominent users on the platform’s own ideological side.

The bottom line

Bluesky has built something real. 43 million registered users, no ads, no algorithmic AI slop, a healthy AT Protocol ecosystem with hundreds of third-party apps, and a daily core community that does treat the platform as their primary social home. That is a significant achievement for a small independent company that took on Meta and Musk simultaneously.

But Ball’s structural argument is the one that matters most. “Bluesky doesn’t have that luxury. It grows or it dies.” A 40% year-over-year drop in daily active users, an estimated 4 to 5 percent monthly compounding decline in posters and likers, and a culture that even left-leaning power users describe as actively hostile to staying on the platform are not the conditions under which a venture-funded social network reverses a downward trend without major changes.

Whether Schneider, Benzer, and the new leadership can broaden the conversation enough to retain users in the next twelve months, or whether Bluesky stabilizes as a smaller and more ideologically self-selecting community of around three to five million daily active users, is the actual open question. The Cuban, Ball, and Hamill moments are not the cause of the decline. They are early warning indicators that some of the platform’s most committed boosters have already noticed the same thing the engagement data has been showing for over a year.

As Ball put it on Easter Sunday, “Maybe you don’t care if Bluesky dies, though accelerationism makes even less sense for social media than it does for real-world politics. But staying the same isn’t really an option. The choices, alas, are grow or die. Right now, Bluesky’s heading towards the latter.”

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming and tech, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• James Ball / Techtris (April 5, 2026), “Is Bluesky dying?” Substack essay including verified daily liker and poster trend analysis and the 4-5% monthly decline calculation

• TechCrunch, CNBC, Bluesky‘s official blog, MediaPost, BusinessToday, and Dataconomy, March 9-10, 2026 coverage of Jay Graber stepping down as CEO and Toni Schneider taking over as interim CEO

• Forbes, Similarweb, Business Insider, and Techbuzz, October 2025 daily active user data showing the 39.8% year-over-year decline

• Business Insider (June 9, 2025), Mark Cuban’s verified Bluesky posts including “lack of diversity of thought,” “agree with me or you are a Nazi fascist,” and the “We are forcing posts to X” series

• Men’s Journal, Yahoo Finance, Fortune, Fox News, and TechCrunch coverage of the Mark Cuban Bluesky echo chamber commentary in June 2025

• RedState, Fandom Pulse, and Animation Magazine, coverage of the April 2025 Mark Hamill King of Kings Bluesky backlash, with verified Hamill promo post and verified user replies

• Variety, NBC News, Washington Times, Global News, Euronews, and International Business Times, coverage of the May 7, 2026 Mark Hamill AI Trump grave image, the verified Hamill caption, the verified White House response, and Hamill’s verified apology post

• TechCrunch (June 12, 2025), “Bluesky backlash misses the point” alternative framing on the AT Protocol ecosystem

• Sprout Social, Backlinko, Skyscraper, Social Media Today, and Statista, Bluesky growth and engagement statistics through 2025-2026

• Schneider and Benzer’s January 2026 Bluesky roadmap posts, plus TechCrunch and Techbuzz coverage of the 2026 roadmap announcements

IMAX has added Masters of the Universe to its June 5 release slate in a surprise late addition, breaking Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s reported three-week exclusive lock on the premium format. That is a blunt signal about how Disney’s latest Star Wars movie is performing, and the mechanics of how it happened make the story even crazier.

The He-Man reboot was not originally scheduled for IMAX at all. Amazon MGM’s pre-release press materials, including the official Prime Video studio page and the Mattel Films announcement, only listed the film for “regular and Dolby theaters.” The June 5 IMAX deal is a late add. The official IMAX and Masters of the Universe social accounts announced it on May 29-30, 2026, just a week before release.

What actually changed

The Mandalorian and Grogu had a previously reported exclusive IMAX lock running roughly three weeks from its May 22 opening, which would have given it premium-format screens through approximately June 12. Under that arrangement, Masters of the Universe would have had to wait until at least mid-June to access IMAX, well past its June 5 opening weekend.

On May 30, IMAX announced Masters of the Universe would get IMAX screens starting with early access on June 3 and a full wide release on June 5. The official IMAX account posted, “The chase for Power begins. Tickets are on sale now for Masters of the Universe, in IMAX June 5.” The film’s official account followed. “By the Power of Grayskull… Masters of the Universe will be available in IMAX June 5. Get tickets now.”

The IMAX-exclusive poster features Nicholas Galitzine‘s He-Man piloting a Sky Sled while pursued by Skeletor‘s buzzsaw-like Roton vehicles.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is still on IMAX. It is no longer the exclusive holder of those screens. Industry tracker Luiz Fernando confirmed the domestic IMAX shift on social media, and ComicBook.com framed the move as IMAX coming “on top of” the existing Masters of the Universe release plan. The exclusive that Disney had through mid-June has effectively been compressed to two weeks plus shared inventory afterward.

Why this happened

The reason was not officially stated by IMAX or Amazon MGM. The industry consensus is that it is a combination of two converging trends. Mandalorian and Grogu underperforming. And Masters of the Universe generating better-than-expected critical and audience reactions.

The Disney numbers tell the soft-side story.

The Mandalorian and Grogu opened to $82 million over its three-day weekend and $98 million over the four-day Memorial Day frame, plus another $69 million internationally for a global start of roughly $167 million. That is the lowest opening for any live-action Star Wars film in the Disney era.

In its second weekend, the film is projected to drop roughly 69%, landing in the $24 to $30 million range. That would put it in third place behind Obsession, the $750,000 horror film from YouTuber Curry Barker that has already beaten Star Wars on weekdays, and Backrooms, the $10 million A24 release from 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons tracking for $76 to $79 million opening weekend, which would more than triple A24’s previous opening record.

The Disney film also lost the daily top spot to Obsession on weekdays last week. When a Star Wars film is being outperformed by a sub-$1 million horror movie on individual days and out-opened by a $10 million one, IMAX deciding to share premium-format inventory with a He-Man reboot is not surprising. It is the kind of decision exhibitors make when the math is obvious.

Masters of the Universe is getting a real critical boost

The other half of the story is that Masters of the Universe has been generating positive buzz that improved its standing with both audiences and exhibitors.

Critics coming out of the film’s red-carpet premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on May 18 were enthusiastic, praising the cast’s performances, the witty script, and the film’s vibrant sets and costumes. The film stars Galitzine as He-Man and Prince Adam, Jared Leto as Skeletor, Idris Elba as Man-at-Arms, James Purefoy as King Randor, Camila Mendes, Alison Brie, Morena Baccarin, and Kristen Wiig, directed by Travis Knight of Bumblebee (2018) and Kubo and the Two Strings.

Tracking has steadily climbed. Earlier projections from BoxOffice Pro pegged the opening at $32.5 million. The most recent estimates from Dark Horizons now project a $35 to $45 million domestic debut weekend on the strength of the premiere reactions and the late IMAX add.

For a film with a reported production budget of $170 to $200 million, those numbers are still modest. But the trajectory matters. Tracking that is rising in the final week before release, while marketing finds its tone and exhibitors warm to the product, is what justifies IMAX adding a late premium-format slot.

The most likely read is that IMAX, exhibitors, and Amazon MGM looked at Mandalorian and Grogu‘s second-weekend collapse, Masters of the Universe‘s positive premiere buzz, and the available premium-format inventory, and made a straightforward economic decision. IMAX screens are valuable real estate. The exclusive holder no longer justified the exclusive.

Michael getting an overseas IMAX revival is the parallel pattern

Internationally, an even more striking pattern is unfolding. Michael, the Jaafar Jackson-starring Michael Jackson biopic that opened April 24, 2026, is being returned to IMAX screens overseas more than a month into its theatrical run.

Universal Pictures India announced the return on X on May 29, 2026. “You loved it. So it’s back on popular demand. Watch Michael in IMAX and experience the magic on the big screen. Book your tickets now.”

A film that has already completed much of its theatrical run getting brought back into IMAX overseas is unusual. Studios and exhibitors typically use IMAX screens for new releases, not month-old films. The decision suggests that exhibitors in those international markets believe there is still significant audience demand for Michael, enough to justify giving it premium screen space that could otherwise be used for current releases.

Some of that space was previously held by The Mandalorian and Grogu. The film that was supposed to be Disney’s big international theatrical bet for the Star Wars franchise is sharing or losing premium screens overseas to a Michael Jackson biopic that was already winding down.

Taken together with the domestic Masters of the Universe move, the pattern is hard to spin. IMAX inventory is being reallocated on multiple continents, in favor of films exhibitors think will draw more paying customers.

Masters of the Universe still has a hard road

Even with the IMAX boost, Masters of the Universe faces a difficult opening weekend.

It opens against Scary Movie 6, which is tracking for $43 to $53 million per BoxOffice Pro after a viral trailer drove Paramount to move the film up one week to June 5. The R-rated comedy reunion of Marlon, Shawn, and Keenen Ivory Wayans has a “first choice” rating roughly three times that of Masters of the Universe in key demos.

The June 5 weekend also still has to contend with Backrooms in its second frame and Obsession in its third, both of which have been holding far better than typical second- and third-weekend declines suggest. Horror is the dominant force at the box office right now, with audiences under 35 driving most of the energy. Masters of the Universe is targeting an older nostalgia audience that is no longer the default theatrical demo.

Jared Leto‘s recent box office history adds pressure. Morbius (2022) and Haunted Mansion (2023) both underperformed. Leto has also been mostly absent from the Masters of the Universe press tour, which industry observers have linked to ongoing concerns about his commercial appeal and unrelated allegations.

What this says about Star Wars right now

Losing an exclusive IMAX lock this quickly is never a good sign for a major franchise release. The fact that the film breaking the lock is a He-Man reboot whose previous theatrical incarnation in 1987 grossed just $17.3 million in unadjusted dollars, is the kind of detail that historians of the franchise will probably revisit.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is not a total disaster. It opened to nearly $100 million and has a built-in fanbase. But it is behaving more like a soft Disney+ extension than a major theatrical event, and the people who actually book premium-format screens are responding accordingly. Disney has Star Wars: Starfighter with Ryan Gosling and Shawn Levy opening Memorial Day 2027. That film will need to land harder, and hold longer, if Lucasfilm wants to keep the kind of exclusive premium-format arrangements Mandalorian and Grogu lost ahead of schedule.

For Masters of the Universe, getting IMAX added late is genuinely helpful. It does not solve the bigger challenges. The film is entering a market where horror and comedy are currently the most reliable mid-budget draws, where its own marketing has only recently found a tone, and where its lead villain actor has been largely absent from promotion. The IMAX deal is a vote of confidence from exhibitors. Whether audiences match that confidence on June 5 is the actual test.

Both films are reminders that theatrical audiences in 2026 are selective. Big brands still matter, but they no longer guarantee strong holds or premium screen real estate if the opening weekend does not deliver. The Mandalorian and Grogu did not deliver. Masters of the Universe now has IMAX screens it was never supposed to get. The 2026 theatrical year has been one structural surprise after another, and the pattern keeps pointing in the same direction.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming and tech, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Collider, May 30, 2026 reporting on IMAX adding Masters of the Universe and the disruption to The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s exclusive three-week lock

• ComicBook.com, May 30, 2026 framing of the IMAX deal as a surprise late addition “on top of” the previously announced regular and Dolby release

• Dark Horizons, updated Masters of the Universe domestic tracking at $35 to $45 million and confirmation of the 69% second-weekend drop projection for The Mandalorian and Grogu

• IMAX official X account and Masters of the Universe official X account, verified May 29-30, 2026 announcement posts

• Amazon MGM Studios press release and the official Prime Video studio page on Masters of the Universe, confirming the original release plan did not include IMAX

• Mattel Films March 2026 release-date announcement

• Universal Pictures India official X account, May 29, 2026 announcement of Michael returning to international IMAX screens “on popular demand”

• BoxOffice Pro (May 2026) earlier Masters of the Universe tracking projections at $32.5 million and Scary Movie 6 tracking at $43 to $53 million

• Deadline and World of Reel, second-weekend projections for The Mandalorian and Grogu and Memorial Day weekend box office context

• Wikipedia and Variety, Masters of the Universe 2026 production background, cast, and budget reporting

On May 17, 2026, the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America held a Dungeons & Dragons fundraiser at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood. Six DSA-endorsed candidates played an election-themed campaign in front of roughly 400 people, with celebrity game master Brennan Lee Mulligan running the table. The event raised approximately $30,000 for the candidates’ local campaigns.

Mulligan, who has been a member of the DSA since 2013, opened the evening with a direct connection between the game and the politics. “We are very lucky that we get to tell stories about heroes going and saving the world, and it makes it very special to be here with people that are saving this city,” he told the crowd, per Los Angeles Times coverage of the event.

It is the latest example of the far left fully embracing Dungeons & Dragons as both entertainment and a tool for community building and political messaging. But this adoption sits uncomfortably with the game’s actual origins, and the gaming community in 2026 already lives inside a hotly political environment that does not need another layer added on top.

The fundraiser was an explicit fantasy of progressive organizing

The six candidates onstage at the Fonda played characters that mirrored their real-world campaigns. Hugo Soto-Martinez, a labor organizer and city councilmember running for reelection in District 13, played a barbarian named “Hugo the Organizer” using his “righteous indignation” to organize workers. Estuardo Mazariegos, running to replace Curren Price in a South L.A. district, played and meowed throughout the game as a purple-striped humanoid cat named “Nine Lives E.” Marissa Roy, DSA’s pick for L.A. City Attorney, played a gavel-carrying paladin looking to uphold the law.

The full DSA-endorsed slate also included Eunisses Hernandez (LA City Council District 1), Faizah Malik (LA City Council District 11), and Dr. Rocio Rivas (LA Unified School Board, District 2).

The framing was deliberate. As DSA members told the LA Times, the event “tied in tightly with the leftist movement, fulfilling the ideological patterns of coming up with ways to save the world as a small group of individuals fighting powers bigger than themselves.” One member specifically noted that D&D players had faced ridicule for being outside expected norms for years before the game entered the mainstream, much like the DSA itself.

Brennan Lee Mulligan is uniquely positioned to bridge these worlds. The 38-year-old comedian and gamemaster is creator and host of Dropout‘s Dimension 20 actual play series. In October 2025, he took over from Matthew Mercer as Dungeon Master for the fourth campaign of Critical Role. He has run other D&D events for political purposes and starred in a DSA political ad highlighting the six candidates.

Gary Gygax was a Life Member of the Libertarian Party

Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons with Dave Arneson, was open about his political views on the Dragon’s Foot and ENWorld Q&A forums he used to interact directly with fans before his death in 2008.

In a verifiable post on Dragon’s Foot, Gygax wrote: “I am a Life Member of the Libertarian Party, not a liberal as defined by today’s standards, and very much concerned about Islamofascism, a threat I think worse than that of the Nazis and Imperial Japan in the 1930s and 40s. This latter view places me at extreme with the Libertarian position, which I view as extremely flawed.”

His political views had federal-level documentation as well. In 2017, Reason magazine reporter C.J. Ciaramella obtained the FBI’s file on TSR through a Freedom of Information Act request. A May 1995 FBI report flagged Gygax as “eccentric and frightening,” a man who carried a weapon and proudly answered every letter he received from a prisoner, with an alleged offshore holding company. The report concluded, “He is known to be a member of the Libertarian Party.”

That political philosophy is visible in the DNA of early Dungeons & Dragons. The original game rewarded personal initiative, clever problem-solving, and risk-taking. Characters gained power through their own actions and the luck of the dice, not through collective mandates or institutional approval. The game was built around exploration, treasure, and carving out your own space in a dangerous world, often in opposition to established authority.

Gygax himself made the point about individual creative agency directly. In the afterword to the original D&D manuals, he encouraged players to resist contacting him for clarification on rules and lore. “Why have us do any more of your imagining for you?”

The 1979 Dungeon Master’s Guide defined the “good” alignment in language pulled almost directly from the Declaration of Independence. “Basically stated, the tenets of good are human rights, or in the case of AD&D, creature rights. Each creature is entitled to life, relative freedom, and the prospect of happiness.”

That is not a socialist mission statement. It is recognizably American individualism applied to fantasy gaming.

The corporate effort to distance the game from its creators

Under Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro, there has been a sustained effort to soften or outright criticize the game’s origins, accelerating around the 2024 50th anniversary.

The official Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977 book, with a forward by Wizards of the Coast lead designer Jason Tondro, included commentary that critics characterized as accusing early D&D of sexism, of treating slavery as simple commerce rather than tragedy, and of other elements now considered problematic.

Robert J. Kuntz, one of the earliest and most important figures in the development of Dungeons & Dragons alongside Gygax, blasted Wizards of the Coast in a series of posts via his Three Line Studio X account.

“You know I have to take a break from posting. This whole attack upon Ole TSR has really tripped my trigger. A 50th year celebration and this is it: Of the original D&D authors and its supplements Gary, Dave, Jim Ward and Brian Blume are gone; and that leaves me alone as the last man standing, the last author. It really is a burden watching this slanderous episode unfold. And it was done without one bat of the eyelash, a WoTC fait accompli, done in such an assumptive manner as if they wield the holy articles on morality which they enact with their reprehensible judge, jury and executioner demeanor.”

Kuntz went further in subsequent posts. “Anyone who would wait until the majority of authors who created the game were gone to stick it to them in this manner is a vile snake; and just to complete the deed do it on the 50th, show their admirers who’s in charge.”

He also tied the criticism to ongoing changes in the product itself. “It’s not just Gary or Dave and us others. It’s also about wanting to wipe out that success and claim it as their own; and in order to do that the fandom must be attacked as well as that history. All of it must be purged and never again allowed to exist.”

(Watch our podcast interview with Robert J. Kuntz below.)

So is D&D actually a socialist game?

Technically, no. And the reasons are baked into the game’s design DNA, not into anyone’s partisan grievance.

Dungeons & Dragons was built by Gygax, a Life Member of the Libertarian Party, and Dave Arneson as an individualist sandbox. The mechanical structure rewards clever risk-takers making personal choices. Characters gain power through their own actions and the luck of the dice, not through collective mandates or institutional approval. Gygax’s afterword to the original manuals told players to stop bothering him with rules questions because “why have us do any more of your imagining for you?”

That is not a socialist mission statement. It is recognizably American individualism applied to fantasy gaming.

Can the game be played in a way that mirrors socialist organizing? Sure. Your table, your rules. That is part of why D&D has survived for fifty years. Evangelical Christian groups have used it for fellowship. Libertarians have used it for individualist roleplay. Therapy groups use it for emotional processing. Progressive activists use it for fundraising and political messaging. The flexibility of the system is the entire point. A small group of people sits down at a table and imagines something together, and what they imagine is up to them.

What the rules also do not do is endorse the framing. The fact that you can play D&D as a socialist organizing exercise does not mean the game itself is socialist any more than playing it as a Christian fellowship activity makes the game Christian. The system is neutral. The framing the DSA used is the framing the DSA brought to the table.

But the intent of the men who created it was not socialism

If the question is what the actual creators of Dungeons & Dragons intended the game to be, the answer is documented and unambiguous. Gygax was on record about his libertarianism in dozens of forum posts. The FBI flagged it in their TSR file. His writing about player agency, individual responsibility, and the dangers of letting institutions do your thinking for you is consistent across decades.

The one surviving original author has been even more direct about this. Robert J. Kuntz has spent the last several years objecting publicly to what he calls a “purge” of the game’s history. His objection is not just about the Wizards of the Coast 50th anniversary materials. It is a broader argument that D&D was built as a space for unbounded individual imagination, and that turning it into any kind of explicit political vehicle, from any direction, betrays the design philosophy of the people who actually made it.

Kuntz is not a hypothetical “they probably would have hated this.” He is the last man standing from the original author group, and he has been clear about it on his own X account, in interviews, and in conversations with the broader TTRPG community. The surviving original-era TSR staff he speaks for share that position.

Gygax made his thoughts on the matter even clearer through his game design choices. He gave players “alignment” as a tool for individual moral exploration, not for political messaging. He defined good in Jeffersonian terms. He told players to stop asking him for permission and figure out their own table dynamics. The man built a game whose entire animating principle was that nobody outside your group, not the publisher, not the platform, not the broader culture, gets to dictate what your story is about.

That is the opposite of a game designed for political activism.

The gaming community already does not need this

The other complication for the DSA framing is contextual. The gaming community in 2026 is already inside a sustained, exhausting political battle that has nothing to do with any one party’s organizing.

Game development has spent years dealing with consultancy controversies, DEI mandates from publishers, social media pile-ons over character designs, and an active culture-war proxy battle inside review scores.

Tabletop has not been spared.

Wizards of the Coast has fired staff over politics, walked back lore changes, apologized for older content, and rolled out new rules updates that frame the changes in explicit political terms.

Major actual play creators have publicly aligned themselves with one side or the other. Independent designers have been chased off platforms for posts unrelated to their games. Game stores have been forced to navigate which conventions they can attend without drawing political backlash from one direction or another.

Most working gamers, including a meaningful portion of D&D‘s actual player base, want the table to be the one place where this constant cultural pressure does not follow them. They want to roll dice, eat snacks, kill a dragon, and not have to think about whose political tribe they are signaling membership in by playing a paladin or a barbarian.

Adding a high-profile DSA fundraiser using D&D as an organizing metaphor, with celebrity actual play personalities openly endorsing the framing, does not de-escalate that environment. It escalates it. And it puts the pressure back on tables that just want to play the game.

The version Hasbro sells is no longer the game Gygax made

The Dungeons & Dragons that Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro publish today is a different product from what shipped in 1974. The 2024 rules updates renamed “races” to “species.” Background materials connecting certain races to slavery have been rewritten or removed. Player safety tools allow individual participants to stop a session at any point. The marketing of the game has gradually shifted toward whichever cultural conversation Hasbro’s strategy team finds most useful in a given quarter.

How players respond depends on what they want from the game. Many newer players, including millions who came to D&D through Stranger Things, Critical Role, Dimension 20, and the actual play boom of the last decade, welcome the changes as making the game more inclusive and easier to teach to new groups. Many longtime players, including Kuntz and a meaningful portion of the surviving original-era TSR staff, see the changes as a top-down corporate rebrand that has pulled the game away from its individualist roots.

Both readings are defensible. They reflect a real cultural shift that has divided the D&D community for several years.

The bottom line

The DSA candidates onstage at the Fonda raised $30,000 for their campaigns under the banner of a fantasy adventure game. They are allowed to do that. The format works because the system is genuinely flexible. Dimension 20 and Critical Role have proven that D&D can be a vehicle for almost any kind of storytelling, including overtly political storytelling.

But framing the game itself as ideologically aligned with democratic socialism, as if the design supports the politics, gets the history exactly backwards. The men who built Dungeons & Dragons believed in individual agency, personal responsibility, and a deep suspicion of institutional authority telling people what to imagine. The corporate stewards of the brand in 2026 have moved in a different direction, and the loudest cultural ambassadors of the current version come from a specific point on the political spectrum.

The result is a game whose original design philosophy, current corporate positioning, and most visible 2026 cultural use are all pulling in different directions, while the broader gaming community is already exhausted by political tribalism in spaces that used to be a refuge from it.

Your table, your rules. That part is true and worth defending. But if you want to know what the people who actually created the game believed it was for, the record is right there, and it was not socialism. It was a sandbox for individuals to imagine something dangerous, glorious, and entirely their own, free from anyone else, including the game’s publishers, telling them what their story was supposed to mean.

That is the version Gygax and Arneson built. It is the version Robert J. Kuntz is still fighting for. And it is the version that has the hardest time surviving when every party at the table comes pre-loaded with someone else’s politics.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming and tech, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Los Angeles Times and AOL republication, May 2026 coverage of the DSA-LA Dungeons & Dragons fundraiser at the Fonda Theatre, including the verified Brennan Lee Mulligan quote and the specific characters played by the six DSA-endorsed candidates

• DSA-LA official event listing and AXS US event page, confirmed candidate slate including Eunisses Hernandez, Estuardo Mazariegos, Faizah Malik, Hugo Soto-Martínez, Marissa Roy, and Dr. Rocio Rivas

• Reason magazine (June 2017), C.J. Ciaramella’s Freedom of Information Act request on the FBI’s TSR file and verified report language on Gygax’s Libertarian Party membership

• Boing Boing and Brian Carnell (June 2017), follow-up coverage of the FBI file findings

• Dragon’s Foot and RPGCodex archives, verified Gygax forum statement on his Libertarian Party Life Membership and his nuanced disagreement with the Libertarian Party position on foreign policy

• Bounding Into Comics, and Fandom Pulse, 2024 coverage of the Robert J. Kuntz response to the Wizards of the Coast 50th anniversary materials and Jason Tondro’s forward in The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977

• Robert J. Kuntz’s official Three Line Studio X account, verified direct posts on the WotC controversy

• Scientific American and Time Out New York, background on Brennan Lee Mulligan and the Dimension 20 and Critical Role actual play scene

• EN World and Wikipedia, biographical context on Robert J. Kuntz and the early TSR development team

The Pokémon Company International has reportedly implemented new rules banning partnered vendors from selling graded slabs at official events. The policy also restricts items priced over $1,000 and most Japanese Pokémon Center products. The changes are already in effect at this weekend’s Indianapolis Regional Championships (May 29-31, 2026) and are expected to apply to bigger tournaments including the North America International Championships and the 2026 Pokémon World Championship in San Francisco in August.

The move is being framed as a major crackdown on scalper and investor culture, with the goal of shifting official events back toward competitive play, families, and regular collectors. It also lines up with a much bigger structural change Pokémon Japan is rolling out at the same time.

What the new rules actually say

According to reporting from PokéBeach, which broke the story on May 29, 2026, TPCi has told partnered vendors that they can no longer sell:

• Graded slabs (cards in protective cases from grading companies like PSA, CGC, or BGS)

• Individual items priced at $1,000 or more

• Most Japanese Pokémon Center products, including plush and TCG items

PokéBeach noted that the restriction means high-end chase cards like the wildly popular Umbreon ex can no longer be sold at events.

The policy took effect at this weekend’s Indianapolis Regionals and will continue through the international circuit. The Pokémon Company is not expected to make an official public announcement. The information has come through internal communications to vendors, with multiple outlets including Kotaku confirming they have reached out to the company for comment.

The restrictions only apply to official partnered vendors at TPCi-sanctioned events. They do not apply to private sales between collectors, unofficial card shows, online marketplaces like eBay and WhatNot, or local game stores.

The Japan side of the story is even bigger

The Japanese Pokémon Center restriction is directly connected to a major policy shift happening in Japan that has not gotten enough mainstream coverage in North America.

In May 2026, Pokémon Japan announced that beginning around August 2026, customers will need to verify their identity using Japan’s government-issued My Number Card in order to enter lotteries or purchase select TCG products from Pokémon Center Online. Verification will use a smartphone’s NFC reader to scan the card via a government-approved external service, linking the user to their Pokémon Player Club account without storing personal data.

The practical effect is that overseas collectors will generally be locked out of buying popular Japanese TCG items from the official Pokémon Center website. The My Number Card is issued primarily to Japanese citizens and long-term foreign residents who have a residency record. The system is expected to roll out before the upcoming Pokémon 30th Anniversary set, one of the most anticipated TCG releases of the year.

That context explains why TPCi is also pulling Japanese Pokémon Center products from its U.S. and international event vendors. It would be a bad look for TPCi to allow partnered vendors at internationally-accessible events to keep selling Japanese-exclusive items at markup when fans in Japan are about to be required to show government ID to buy the same products. PokéBeach made this connection explicit in its reporting.

Why Pokémon is doing this

The Pokémon TCG has been dealing with major scalping and accessibility issues for years. During the pandemic boom and beyond, certain sets became extremely difficult for regular players and kids to find at retail prices. At the same time, the graded card market exploded, with high-end slabs turning parts of the hobby into more of an investment vehicle than a game.

The numbers at the high end tell the story. In February 2026, Logan Paul‘s Pikachu Illustrator card sold at auction for $16.5 million, setting a Guinness World Record for the most expensive trading card ever sold. A PSA 10 1st Edition Shadowless Charizard sold for $550,000 at Heritage Auctions in December 2025. A PSA 10 1st Edition Blastoise Holo sold for $88,000 in July 2025. According to the analytics firm Card Ladder, Pokémon cards have produced a cumulative return of roughly 3,821% between 2004 and August 2025.

Pokémon is no longer just a card game. Parts of it are a fully financialized asset class.

The investor culture has also trickled down to kids. Kotaku‘s Kenneth Shepard ran a piece earlier this month titled “11-Year-Old Pokémon Card Collector Isn’t A Fan: ‘I Just Flip Cards,’” documenting how an 11-year-old at a Pokémon TCG influencer event spoke openly about flipping cards rather than collecting them or playing the game. The article noted how completely the franchise’s audience has shifted from kids and competitive players to investors of all ages, including kids learning the language of speculation before they hit middle school.

Official events had increasingly become places where vendors focused heavily on high-value graded cards and sealed product speculation. Many longtime players and parents have complained that vendor halls at big tournaments felt more like investment conventions than spaces for families and competitive players.

By restricting graded slabs and high-dollar items, TPCi appears to be trying to:

• Reduce the incentive for scalpers and investors to dominate vendor space at official events

• Make events feel more welcoming to casual players and younger collectors

• Push back against the perception that Pokémon is primarily a speculative market

• Avoid the optics of partnered vendors selling thousand-dollar cards to children at family-friendly tournaments

How big of a change is this?

For many vendors, this is a significant shift. Graded slabs and high-value sealed product have been major profit drivers at big events. Removing them or heavily restricting them will likely reduce revenue for some vendors and could lead to smaller or less diverse vendor halls at official tournaments.

For competitive players and families, the change is mostly positive in theory. It could make events feel less overwhelming and more focused on the actual game. However, some collectors worry it will make it harder to find certain high-end or Japanese-exclusive items at official events.

The policy does not kill the secondary market. Graded cards can still be bought and sold online, at unofficial card shows, and through private transactions. This affects only what partnered vendors can sell at TPCi events.

This also is not the first time TPCi has issued product prohibitions to its partner network. In 2024, the company warned hobby stores to stop selling Play! Pokémon booster packs and event promo cards, which are provided to organized play stores for free.

Community reaction is mostly supportive but mixed

Reactions on PokéBeach’s forums and other community spaces have been largely supportive from competitive players and parents.

Many see it as a necessary step to push back against scalping culture. Some collectors and vendors are frustrated, arguing it limits what they can sell and could hurt smaller businesses. There is ongoing debate about whether this actually helps kids and casual players, or if it is mostly symbolic and just shifts the slab sales elsewhere.

A common community criticism is that TPCi could do more to address the underlying problem by simply increasing pull rates on rare cards, which would drive down their secondary market value and make speculation less attractive. The counterargument is that better pull rates would reduce sales of additional packs, which is exactly the dynamic the current scarcity model depends on.

Another frequent comment is that TPCi has invested heavily in TikTok and YouTube influencers who primarily talk about card prices and box openings rather than the game itself, sending mixed messages about what the brand actually wants its culture to look like.

The bottom line

Pokémon is cracking down on graded slabs and high-value items at official events. The policy is real, already in effect at the Indianapolis Regional this weekend, and appears designed to shift the focus of sanctioned events away from investment and speculation and back toward playing the game and celebrating the franchise.

Combined with Japan’s incoming My Number Card ID verification system, the broader picture is that The Pokémon Company is taking a coordinated international run at the scalper and investor culture that has dominated parts of the hobby for the last five years. The U.S. event policy is the visible front. The Japan online policy is the structural backbone.

It will not magically fix scalping or make every product easy to find at MSRP. The secondary market is too large, too profitable, and too global for one vendor policy to dismantle. But for the first time in a while, the company appears willing to absorb a real revenue hit at its own events to send a clear signal about what kind of culture it wants around its biggest tournaments. For families and competitive players who have spent the last several years watching the hobby tilt toward speculation, that signal is overdue.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming and tech, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• PokéBeach (May 29, 2026), original exclusive reporting by Water Pokémon Master on the graded slab ban, $1,000 item restriction, and Japanese Pokémon Center product prohibition

• Kotaku, Game Rant, and 4GAMER.INFO, follow-up coverage of the new vendor policy and the broader scalper crackdown context

• PokéBeach and GamerBraves (May 22, 2026), original reporting on the Pokémon Japan My Number Card ID verification system

• Kotaku and Wargamer, additional coverage of the August 2026 Japan ID rollout and its implications for the Pokémon 30th Anniversary set

• Kotaku (May 19, 2026), Kenneth Shepard’s “11-Year-Old Pokémon Card Collector Isn’t A Fan: ‘I Just Flip Cards’” article documenting investor culture trickling down to kids

• CNBC (May 22, 2026) and Reader’s Digest (April 2026), broader coverage of Logan Paul’s $16.5 million Pikachu Illustrator sale and the financialization of the Pokémon TCG hobby

• Business Insider and AOL, Logan Paul’s commentary on young investors and collectibles versus traditional stocks

• Card Ladder, cumulative Pokémon card return data showing 3,821% growth between 2004 and August 2025

When Pixar announced Toy Story 5, the assumption was that Woody and Buzz Lightyear would be back at the center of the story. They have been the franchise’s heart since 1995. According to co-director and co-writer Andrew Stanton, that was not always the plan.

Stanton recently revealed to CinemaBlend that he wrote the entire first draft of Toy Story 5 with no Woody at all. He was running a test. He wanted to see if the franchise could survive without the cowboy who built it.

The fact that he tested this matters more than the trivia value suggests. Disney has a recent and expensive track record of franchise extensions that stripped out their core dynamic and got punished by audiences. Toy Story 5 was one rewrite away from joining the list.

Why Woody was left out of the first draft

At the end of Toy Story 4, Woody makes a major life choice. After helping Gabby Gabby find a child and reuniting with Bo Peep, he decides to stay behind at the carnival, gives up his voice box, and chooses to live as a lost toy. It was a poignant ending that felt like a true send-off.

When it came time to write Toy Story 5, Stanton was not immediately sure how to bring Woody back organically.

“I do admit that I didn’t know how to bring him back at first, and so I just, ‘cause I know it’s gonna take so many drafts to get the movie right, I just wrote the first one without him just to see if I missed him. And, I did.”

Stanton explained his writing philosophy this way. “My rule is if you take something out, especially a character, would the story be able to happen with or without them? And if it can’t, that means good, that they had to be essential no matter how much, it may not be obvious that they’re the role they’re playing in the movie.”

His conclusion was unambiguous. “Now I can’t imagine it any other way.”

In an interview with the Associated Press, Stanton said he had been initially skeptical about even doing a fifth film. “I cautiously said, let me write the crappy first draft, because I always write a crappy first draft, but at least I’ll figure out myself where I’d like to see it go just as a fan, let alone somebody that’s been behind the camera with it.”

Producer Lindsay Collins has been candid about how rocky the initial response was when Pixar first revealed Woody would return. “I just loved after our first teaser, like how much hate we were getting about, like, I thought Woody was gone, and then the second trailer we showed, everybody’s like, ‘Oh, I get it. He needed to come back.’”

The data on what happens when you skip that test is brutal.

Lightyear is the cautionary tale sitting on the shelf

In 2022, Pixar released Lightyear, the spin-off positioned as “the movie that inspired the Buzz Lightyear toy.” It featured no Woody, no Jessie, and none of the toy-room dynamic that defines the Toy Story franchise. Chris Evans voiced Buzz, Angus MacLane directed, and Disney spent $200 million producing it plus another estimated $100 million-plus on marketing.

The film was projected to open between $70 and $80 million domestically. It opened to $51 million, the kind of debut Pixar had not seen since the days before computer animation made the studio a household name. It topped out at $226.4 million worldwide and lost Pixar an estimated $106 million.

Critics gave it mixed but generally positive reviews. The visuals were lovely. The action was capable. The problem was that it was a sci-fi adventure starring a character audiences only recognized in the context of being a toy. Without the toy-room context, Buzz Lightyear is just a generic space ranger in a generic space adventure. The thing that made Buzz Buzz was Woody calling him a “Mrs. Nesbitt looking” lunatic in 1995. Lightyear did not have that. It had a space cat.

The audience reaction matched the box office. Online discussion of Lightyear in the months after release coalesced around a simple complaint. Buzz Lightyear without Woody is not really Buzz Lightyear. Stripping out the core dynamic stripped out the brand.

Disney has run this play badly more than once

Lightyear is not the only franchise extension Disney has shipped without its core dynamic in recent years. It is just the most expensive Pixar example.

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) tried to tell a Han Solo origin without the Leia, Luke, or established Chewie-Han buddy dynamic that made the character iconic. It cost $275 million after Phil Lord and Chris Miller were fired and Ron Howard redid the film. It grossed $393 million worldwide and lost Disney an estimated $70 to $100 million, becoming the first Star Wars film ever to lose money theatrically.

The Marvels (2023) tried to extend the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a team-up movie pulled from three different streaming and theatrical contexts without the central MCU ensemble dynamic. It cost $274 million to produce. It grossed $206 million worldwide and lost an estimated $237 million, the largest single bomb in the MCU’s history.

The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026) just opened to $98 million over its Memorial Day four-day, the lowest Disney-era Star Wars debut. The film is now projected to drop 65 to 70% in its second weekend, losing daily box office to the $1 million horror film Obsession and getting roughly doubled by the $10 million A24 horror release Backrooms. The criticism from much of the fan base is the same one Lightyear received. Without the broader Star Wars ensemble context, The Mandalorian is a Disney+ TV show on a movie screen.

The pattern is consistent. Strip the core dynamic out of a franchise, and the audience notices. They might still show up. They probably will not love it. The studio almost certainly loses money.

Pixar’s recent originals have struggled even harder

Stanton’s stress test also reflects a broader reality at Pixar. The studio’s recent track record on anything that is not a major-franchise sequel has been rough.

Onward (2020) was disrupted by the pandemic and ended at $142 million worldwide. Strange World (2022) bombed catastrophically, grossing roughly $73 million against a $180 million-plus budget. Elemental (2023) opened to a Pixar-low $48.5 million before legs eventually carried it to $496 million worldwide. Elio (2025) flopped on release.

The pattern Pixar leadership noticed is the same one Disney noticed across its broader portfolio. Originals and spin-offs without core franchise DNA are underperforming. Sequels with the dynamic intact are still cleaning up. Inside Out 2 opened to $154 million in 2024 and went on to gross $1.69 billion worldwide, the biggest animated release in history.

Pixar has publicly acknowledged the tension. Speaking ahead of the studio’s upcoming original feature Hoppers, Pixar leadership has emphasized that the studio knows originals have to keep existing alongside the franchise plays, even as the box office data keeps pushing it back toward sequels. Stanton himself has echoed this in interviews around the Toy Story 5 press cycle.

Toy Story 5’s plot brings Woody back through a modern crisis

Toy Story 5 is set for release on June 19, 2026 and introduces a deliberately modern complication. Bonnie receives a tablet device named Lilypad, and the screen’s glow soon monopolizes the child’s attention. The neglected toys grow increasingly anxious.

Jessie, voiced again by Joan Cusack, is now leading the room and contacts Woody to come back and help. Tom Hanks, 68, returns as Woody, now sporting a noticeable bald spot that has been a major topic of fan discussion since the trailers dropped. Tim Allen, 71, returns as Buzz.

“I can tell you that it’s a lot about Jessie. Tom and I do, Woody and I, do realign. And there’s an unbelievable opening scene with Buzz Lightyear,” Allen told WIVB.

Stanton first teased the Toy Story 5 concept at the D23 Expo in August 2024. “This time around, it’s toy meets tech. It’s going to be fun, and we can’t wait for you all to see it in the summer of 2026.”

The Woody-Buzz reunion sits at the center of the story. The toy-room dynamic stays intact. The thing Lightyear tried to do without is back in place.

So did Disney actually dodge another flop?

Maybe. The early signs for Toy Story 5 are stronger than they were for any of the recent franchise misfires. The last two Toy Story films, Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4, each crossed $1 billion at the global box office. The trailers have driven real anticipation. Stanton’s creative process explicitly tested for the failure mode that sunk Lightyear. The June 19 release window is essentially clear of major competition, since Star Wars, Masters of the Universe, and Scary Movie are all opening or already in theaters in the weeks ahead of it.

But this is the same studio that thought Lightyear, Solo, The Marvels, and Strange World would work. The thing all four of those films had in common was leadership convinced that brand recognition plus high-quality filmmaking could carry a movie even when the core dynamic was missing.

The honest answer to the question in the headline is that Disney appears to have learned the lesson on Toy Story 5, at least at the script-development level. Whether the actual film honors what Stanton found in his rewrite, and whether the audience rewards the discipline at the box office, is what the June 19 opening will actually tell us.

For now, the fact that Toy Story 5 even seriously considered going out without Woody, and pulled back when the math did not work, is the story. Most of Disney’s recent franchise extensions did not run that test, or ran it and ignored the result. The box office wreckage is sitting right there.

Stanton ran the test. Pixar listened to the answer. Whether that is enough to deliver another billion-dollar Toy Story opening or just enough to avoid a Lightyear-sized loss, June 19 will decide.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming and tech, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• CinemaBlend, Andrew Stanton’s full interview discussing the first-draft Woody experiment and his rule on character necessity

• Associated Press and Washington Times, Stanton’s broader career retrospective and “crappy first draft” comments

• ScreenRant, ComingSoon, SuperHeroHype, and Yahoo Entertainment, follow-up coverage of Stanton’s CinemaBlend quotes

• People and WIVB, Tim Allen’s “lot about Jessie” comments on Toy Story 5

• Pixar and Disney D23 Expo 2024 official footage, Stanton’s “toy meets tech” reveal

• The Hollywood Reporter, MovieWeb, SlashFilm, and ScreenRant, comprehensive coverage of Lightyear‘s $51 million opening, $226.4 million worldwide gross, and estimated $100 million-plus loss

• Yahoo Entertainment and Variety, coverage of Pixar’s broader 2020-2025 box office pattern including Onward, Strange World, Elemental, and Elio

• The Wrap and box office analyst Shawn Robbins, Pixar’s struggle to event-ize non-IP releases

• Box Office Mojo and The Numbers, verified franchise totals including the Toy Story series’ $3 billion lifetime gross

• Industry reporting on Solo: A Star Wars Story and The Marvels losses as recent Disney franchise extension comparisons

• Deadline and World of Reel, current week-two projections for The Mandalorian and Grogu

The claim floating around online is blunt. The Mandalorian and Grogu is losing ground at the box office to a horror movie that cost less than $1 million, and a new A24 horror film called Backrooms is tracking to outgross it this weekend by nearly two-to-one. A Star Wars movie losing the box office to two micro-budget horror titles within two weeks of release supposedly says something bleak about the franchise.

The full picture is even more interesting than the doomposting suggests. Here is what is actually happening.

The Mandalorian and Grogu baseline

The Mandalorian and Grogu opened to $82 million domestically over its three-day weekend and $98 million over the four-day Memorial Day frame from May 22 to 25, plus another $63 million internationally for a global start of roughly $163 million.

That is the lowest opening for any live-action Star Wars film since Disney took over Lucasfilm in 2012. The film is now in its second weekend and facing real pressure from newer releases.

Obsession is a once-in-a-generation horror story

Obsession is the kind of indie horror breakout the box office almost never sees.

The film was made for a reported budget of $750,000 by 26-year-old YouTuber Curry Barker, who shot it in 20 days in his native Alabama. Focus Features acquired the title at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival for roughly $15 million in partnership with Blumhouse-Atomic Monster and Divide/Conquer. It opened on the weekend of May 15 to $17.2 million.

Then something nearly unheard of happened.

In its second weekend over Memorial Day, Obsession earned $23.9 million for a three-day total, plus another roughly $5 million on the Memorial Day Monday for a four-day total north of $28 million. That represents a 39% week-over-week growth that almost never happens in wide-release horror. Most horror films drop hard in week two. Obsession grew.

Jason Blum, who produced the film through Blumhouse-Atomic Monster, addressed the rarity of the result directly on X.

“Obsession is the ONLY wide-release horror film on record to grow in its second weekend at this scale — $22.4M, up 30% over opening. This doesn’t happen in horror. Grateful to Focus Features, Blumhouse-Atomic Monster, & Divide/Conquer for championing this movie from the start.”

As of late May, Obsession has grossed over $60 million domestically and over $79 million worldwide against its sub-$1 million production budget. The film earned an A- CinemaScore and holds a 94% Rotten Tomatoes audience score. Roughly 75% of its audience is between the ages of 18 and 25. Barker is already in post-production on a second horror-comedy for Focus and Blumhouse called Anything but Ghosts, and he is signed to write and direct A24’s next Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Backrooms is going to be even bigger

Backrooms opened Friday, May 29, 2026, and the actual numbers are nearly double what analysts projected just three weeks ago.

The film is directed by Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old YouTuber who created the viral Backrooms web series at age 16 with his 2022 short The Backrooms (Found Footage). The A24 and Chernin Entertainment production carries a reported budget of just $10 million, with James Wan producing alongside Atomic Monster and others. The cast includes Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell, working from a script by Will Soodik.

Three weeks ago, Backrooms was tracking around $20 million for its opening weekend. By Wednesday, that had climbed to $45 to $50 million. By Thursday night, the film had already pulled in $10.4 million in previews. By the time the dust settled on opening Friday, Backrooms was tracking for a three-day weekend of $76 to $79 million across 3,442 theaters, with some industry observers floating the possibility of $80 million-plus.

That would make Backrooms the largest opening in A24’s history by a wide margin, beating the previous record held by 2024’s Civil War ($25.5 million) by roughly three times. The film holds an 87% Rotten Tomatoes Certified Fresh rating heading into the weekend. 87% of opening-day audiences are under 35.

For context, Backrooms‘s opening weekend will roughly double The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s opening weekend, even though Star Wars opened on more screens with vastly more marketing and a global brand built over five decades. A $10 million horror film with a 20-year-old first-time director is on track to outgross the seven-years-in-the-making theatrical return of Star Wars.

Mark Duplass, who stars in Backrooms, defended Parsons on X after online rumors questioned whether the young director had really helmed the film. “When I was there, Kane was 100% in control. More so than many directors 3x his age.”

The YouTuber horror trend is now real

Obsession and Backrooms are not isolated cases. They are part of a broader Gen Z creator-to-feature pipeline that is suddenly producing legitimate theatrical hits.

In February 2026, Iron Lung opened to a remarkable $50 million against a $3 million budget. The film was self-financed, directed, and distributed by Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach, the YouTuber with over 38 million subscribers. Iron Lung‘s success helped renew Hollywood interest in indie projects from creator-driven filmmakers.

Now Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, both first-time feature directors who built their audiences on YouTube before age 26 and 20 respectively, are running a similar play with even bigger results.

The Wrap’s box office team flagged the broader pattern. “A new ‘Star Wars’ movie hit theaters over the holiday (it did fine), but the story of the Memorial Day box office weekend is ‘Obsession.’”

Blum told Variety that the trend reflects something real about the current audience. “There’s a new generation of moviegoers who are declaring a very specific taste for horror movies that is quite left-of-center.”

What this actually means for Star Wars

This is not just one bad weekend for Star Wars. It is another data point in a larger trend.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is a well-reviewed, crowd-pleasing movie with strong audience scores. It still opened to nearly $100 million and is currently number one at the domestic box office on a cumulative basis. But the fact that it is losing individual days to a sub-$1 million horror film in week two, and now facing a $10 million A24 release that is tracking to roughly double its opening weekend, shows how much the theatrical landscape has shifted in just a few years.

Star Wars used to be event cinema. Even spin-offs carried weight. Rogue One in 2016 opened to $155 million domestically. Solo in 2018 opened to $84 million and was already considered a disappointment. The Mandalorian and Grogu in 2026 opens to $82 million and is being treated as a near-flop. The trend line is clear.

Right now, Star Wars feels like just another big studio title that has to fight for attention against whatever else is resonating culturally that week. The fact that two of the titles eating Star Wars‘s lunch were directed by YouTubers under 30, made for a combined budget of less than $11 million, and target audiences under 25 is the part that should worry Lucasfilm executives.

The new theatrical reality

Obsession and Backrooms are not “beating Star Wars“ in any permanent sense. They are examples of something else. Audiences are showing up in big numbers for horror that feels fresh, cheap to produce, and easy to talk about online. When a $1 million movie can have a better second-weekend trajectory than a Star Wars film, and a $10 million movie can double its opening weekend, brand recognition alone is no longer the moat it once was.

The disruption that has already hit television, streaming, music, and publishing has now hit theatrical. The advantages a studio franchise once had, like marketing budgets, theater counts, premium-large-format screens, and cultural inertia, are being eroded by audiences who increasingly trust creator-driven projects from people they recognize from YouTube more than they trust legacy IP from corporate studios.

Star Wars is not dead. But the idea that anything with the Star Wars logo is automatically a major theatrical event is clearly over. The two horror films currently passing Star Wars on individual days at the box office are not the cause of that shift. They are the symptom of an audience that has already moved on.

Disney and Lucasfilm have Star Wars: Starfighter with Ryan Gosling and Shawn Levy opening Memorial Day 2027. That film will arrive in a marketplace where YouTube creators making their first features are routinely outgrossing legacy franchise entries. Whether Star Wars can adapt to that reality, or simply continue to lose ground to the next Obsession and the next Backrooms, is the actual question.

The original 1977 Star Wars opened on 32 screens and sold roughly 140 million tickets, more than 60 percent of the U.S. population at the time. The Mandalorian and Grogu will likely sell 10 to 14 million tickets domestically across its full run. Backrooms may sell 8 to 10 million in its first weekend alone.

The franchise that defined the modern blockbuster is now learning what it feels like to be on the wrong side of one.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming and tech, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, and The Wrap, reporting on the Memorial Day 2026 weekend box office and the Backrooms opening Friday tracking surge to $76 to $79 million

• Bloody Disgusting, Fangoria, Nerdbot, SlashFilm, Art Threat, and NBC News, comprehensive coverage of Obsession’s record-breaking second weekend including Curry Barker’s background and production details

• Jason Blum on X, verified quote on Obsession’s second-weekend growth

• Collider and Wikipedia, Backrooms production details, cast, crew, and James Wan producing role

• Mark Duplass on X, defending Kane Parsons against online rumors

• Variety, Iron Lung box office context for Markiplier’s $50 million on a $3 million budget self-financed release

• The Hollywood Reporter (May 27, 2026), Curry Barker career retrospective and Anything But Ghosts and Texas Chainsaw Massacre slate

• Box Office Mojo, verified theater counts and final weekend totals

The Mandalorian and Grogu is heading for a brutal second weekend at the box office. According to multiple industry projections, the film is expected to drop roughly 65 to 70% from its opening frame, landing somewhere around $24 to $30 million domestically. That would put it in third place behind the historic micro-budget horror hit Obsession and the new A24 horror release Backrooms, which is on track to record one of the biggest opening weekends in independent film history.

For a Star Wars movie, this kind of drop is ugly. And the competition is the brutal part.

The week-two collapse

The Mandalorian and Grogu opened to $82 million over its three-day weekend and $98 million over the four-day Memorial Day frame, plus another $69 million overseas, for a global start of about $167 million against a reported $165 million production budget.

That made it the lowest-grossing opening for any Star Wars movie in the Disney era, but still the 12th-best Memorial Day opening of all time and the fourth-best post-COVID Memorial Day debut behind Lilo & Stitch, Top Gun: Maverick, and The Little Mermaid.

One week later, the film is projected to fall to roughly $24 to $30 million for its second weekend, a drop in the 65 to 70% range. Deadline and World of Reel both have it pegged at around 69%.

A 65 to 70% drop is significant even for a holiday opener. Most major studio films aim to hold in the 50 to 60% range in week two. Anything above 65% is considered rough, and 70%-plus is the territory of films that opened strongly but failed to build word-of-mouth momentum or generate repeat viewing.

This kind of decline suggests that while The Mandalorian and Grogu had solid opening-weekend business driven by fans and families, it is not generating the kind of urgent buzz that would help it hold against the new releases hitting theaters this weekend.

Obsession has already beaten it on weekdays

Part of the second-weekend pressure comes from a horror movie that should not realistically be competing with a Star Wars film at all.

Obsession, made by 26-year-old YouTuber Curry Barker for under $1 million in 20 days, has been on a historic theatrical run. The Focus Features release earned $17.2 million in its opening frame, then grew 39% in its second weekend to $23.9 million for a Memorial Day three-day, plus over $5 million more on Monday for a four-day total above $30 million. Blumhouse founder Jason Blum, who produced the film, called it “the ONLY wide-release horror film on record to grow in its second weekend at this scale.”

That weekend hold pushed Obsession past The Mandalorian and Grogu on individual weekdays. On Wednesday, May 27, Obsession earned $5.6 million versus Mandalorian‘s $4.2 million. On Thursday, the gap widened to $4.8 million versus $3.5 million. The horror film reclaimed the daily number one spot from the Star Wars movie two days in a row.

Obsession has now grossed over $60 million domestically and over $79 million worldwide. Comscore chief box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian said he has been tracking box office for 33 years and thought he had seen it all until Obsession‘s second-weekend performance.

Backrooms is opening even bigger

Backrooms is the headline story this weekend.

The A24 and Chernin Entertainment release, directed by 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons based on his viral Backrooms web series, was originally tracking around $20 million three weeks ago. That projection has gradually climbed to $45 to $50 million by midweek, then $70 million-plus by Wednesday evening per World of Reel. By Friday afternoon, the actual numbers tell a different story.

Backrooms pulled in $10.4 million in Thursday previews. Friday alone is tracking between $33 and $35 million across 3,442 theaters. Deadline is now projecting a three-day weekend of $76 to $79 million, with industry observers floating a possible $80 million-plus outcome. The film has an 87% Rotten Tomatoes Certified Fresh rating, and 87% of opening-day audiences are under 35.

If those numbers hold, Backrooms will more than triple A24’s previous opening weekend record of $25.5 million set by Civil War in 2024. It will also more than double The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s opening weekend, against a budget of just $10 million.

A $10 million horror film directed by a 20-year-old in his feature debut is on track to outgross seven years of Star Wars theatrical anticipation by a nearly two-to-one margin in week two.

How does this compare to other Star Wars second weekends?

Historical second-weekend drops for previous Star Wars films, per Box Office Mojo, provide useful context.

• Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015): dropped 39.8% in week two, an exceptional hold

• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016): dropped 58.7%

• Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017): dropped 67.5%, a steep fall from a $220 million opening

• Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018): dropped 65.2% from its three-day, 71.46% from its four-day Memorial Day opening

• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019): dropped 59%

A 65 to 70% drop puts The Mandalorian and Grogu squarely in Solo and Last Jedi territory. That is the company you do not want a Star Wars movie keeping. Solo finished its theatrical run at $392.9 million worldwide and lost Disney an estimated $70 to $100 million. Last Jedi finished at over $1.3 billion globally but is widely cited as the moment the sequel trilogy lost the audience.

Will it even break even?

This is the big question.

The Mandalorian and Grogu had a relatively modest production budget for a Star Wars film at $165 million. When you add global marketing and distribution costs, industry estimates put the worldwide break-even point somewhere in the $475 to $600 million range, depending on which multipliers and which deal terms you assume.

At its current trajectory, the math is tight. The film stood at roughly $108.8 million domestic after Thursday of week two. If it drops 69% to roughly $25 million this weekend and continues at that pace, it is on track for a domestic finish around $180 to $220 million. Combined with international, that suggests a global total in the $350 to $450 million range, the same neighborhood as Solo.

The film does have one advantage. It has a three-week IMAX lock domestically, which will help it weather Backrooms. International performance is also slightly stronger than initial tracking suggested, at $69 million versus an originally reported $63 million. And ancillary revenue from streaming, home video, and merchandise will close some of the gap, particularly with Grogu still being one of the strongest merchandising IPs in the Disney portfolio.

But a clean theatrical break-even now looks unlikely. The Mandalorian and Grogu will probably need its full ancillary tail to avoid joining Solo on the list of money-losing Star Wars films.

The bigger picture for Star Wars

This kind of second-weekend collapse is not just a one-off problem. It is another sign that theatrical Star Wars spin-offs are facing real challenges right now. Solo struggled. The Mandalorian and Grogu is struggling. The brand still has power, but it is no longer an automatic guarantee of strong theatrical performance, especially when the film feels like an extension of a Disney+ TV series rather than a must-see cinematic event.

The competitive context makes the drop look even worse. Obsession and Backrooms are not just any rival releases. They are filmmaker-driven horror titles from creators in their twenties who built their audiences on YouTube. Iron Lung from Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach opened to $50 million on a $3 million budget in February 2026. The pattern is now unmistakable. Young creators with established online followings are bringing audiences back to theaters in a way that legacy franchise extensions are not.

When a Star Wars film is dropping 69% in week two, losing weekdays to a $1 million horror movie, and watching a $10 million A24 release roughly double its opening weekend, it is worth asking whether the current Disney theatrical strategy for Star Wars is working as well as the company hoped.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is not a disaster. But this kind of drop makes it look like one of the weaker entries in the franchise’s theatrical history, and it raises real questions about how much theatrical juice the Star Wars brand still has left. The next Star Wars film, Shawn Levy‘s Star Wars: Starfighter with Ryan Gosling, is set for Memorial Day 2027. It will arrive in a theatrical market where the rules have visibly shifted, and where original genre filmmaking is currently eating franchise legacy filmmaking alive.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming and tech, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Deadline, May 30, 2026 reporting on Backrooms tracking surge to $76 to $79 million and The Mandalorian and Grogu projected 69% second-weekend drop

• World of Reel (May 28, 2026), second-weekend drop projections and Memorial Day box office trends

• The Hollywood Reporter (May 27, 2026), historic Obsession second-weekend performance and Curry Barker career background

• Cosmic Book News and BamSmackPow, reporting on individual weekday performances and Obsession beating Mandalorian on Wednesday and Thursday

• Variety and The Wrap, Backrooms opening weekend tracking and A24 historical opening records

• Box Office Mojo, verified historical second-weekend drops for Force Awakens, Last Jedi, Rise of Skywalker, Rogue One, and Solo

• Rotten Tomatoes Editorial, weekend box office summary and broader Memorial Day weekend analysis

• Cinemablend and Slashfilm, historical context on Rise of Skywalker versus The Force Awakens second-weekend performance

Acclaimed animator Jorge R. Gutierrez (The Book of Life, Maya and the Three) walked away from his AI-generated series Punky Duck at Amazon MGM Studios on Friday, May 29, 2026, just 48 hours after the project was announced as part of Amazon’s new GenAI Creators’ Fund.

The speed of his reversal has highlighted the raw anger in the animation industry over generative AI, and raised real questions about where legitimate criticism ends and harassment begins.

The 48-hour timeline

Wednesday, May 27: At the fourth annual AI on the Lot conference at Culver Studios in Los Angeles, attended by more than 2,400 industry professionals, Amazon MGM and AWS announced the GenAI Creators’ Fund with three Prime Video greenlights: Punky Duck from Gutierrez, Cupcake & Friends from BuzzFeed Studios, and Love, Diana Music Hunters from Albie Hecht. Gutierrez took the stage to enthusiastically discuss his project.

Thursday, May 28: Backlash exploded across animation and creator circles online. Good Advice Cupcake creator Loryn Brantz publicly slammed BuzzFeed for putting her character into the AI pipeline without her involvement. Gutierrez’s Wikipedia page was vandalized with the word “sellout” added to his description. Death threats and threats against his family began arriving.

Friday morning, May 29: Gutierrez announced he was out.

The metaphor that lit the fuse

On the AI on the Lot stage, Gutierrez described the experience of working with Amazon’s generative AI tools as akin to having sex and then immediately being handed the baby. He meant the speed of the process. Where his previous animated work took years, he had gone from initial pitch to greenlight in roughly two months, with what he described as five weeks of actual production work yielding a sizzle that resembled a stop-motion piece using his own character designs.

“I’m used to two years for a pilot, and something like this, it feels like the most rebellious, punk rock thing you can do right now is to make something this fast,” he said. “For someone like me who’s used to waiting so long, this has been a life-changer.”

The metaphor was widely read as dismissive of the labor and collaboration involved in traditional animation. It also clashed directly with Gutierrez’s previous public skepticism toward AI replacing artists.

His prior anti-AI stance made this hit harder

The reversal hurt because Gutierrez had been one of the loudest voices in animation calling out generative AI as a threat to artists.

In 2024, Gutierrez warned that “a whole generation of creators will not be able to make hit movies and series” if AI displaced the apprentice-to-veteran pipeline that animation depends on. The same year, he reportedly described AI’s underlying training data as essentially built on theft. In 2025, he escalated his rhetoric further by comparing generative AI to a machine gun.

His 2014 feature The Book of Life took over a decade to get made, with multiple rejections before Guillermo del Toro helped get it greenlit at Fox. That long fight is part of why his apparent embrace of a two-month AI pipeline felt to many in the community like a betrayal of the artisanal animation tradition he had championed.

The escalation and the family threats

Gutierrez initially tried to respond calmly. Speaking to Cartoon Brew on Wednesday, he said, “It’s a big experiment for me, and I will be as cautious as possible with AI. Artists driving tech, and not the other way around, is my goal.”

By Thursday, the response had escalated beyond reasoned critique. Gutierrez posted on X, in a message that has since been deleted.

“I understand a lot of you are happy for me and a lot of you are really angry at me for experimenting with AI at Amazon. I’m going to leave the comments open so you can get it all out and hopefully feel better. Any death threats will be reported. Anyone threatening Sandra and my son Luka, I will report those too. Come at me all you want and need, just leave my family alone.”

The mention of his wife Sandra and son Luka confirmed what had previously been online speculation. The backlash had crossed into territory most working creators recognize as harassment.

On Instagram, Gutierrez also shared a screenshot showing his Wikipedia page edited to describe him as a “sellout.” His Instagram caption, also since deleted, read: “Whoever did this I thought it was really funny!”

Behind the public-facing humor, the volume and intensity were clearly mounting.

The Del Toro and Miyazaki context

Industry observers also pointed to the broader cultural pressure from senior figures in animation who have been openly hostile to generative AI.

In a viral 2016 clip from the NHK documentary Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki was shown a demo of an AI-generated zombie animation. His reaction has become the defining anti-AI quote in animation. “I am utterly disgusted. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

Guillermo del Toro publicly endorsed Miyazaki’s framing while promoting his stop-motion Pinocchio in 2022. Speaking with Decider, Del Toro said he was “not interested in illustrations made by machines and the extrapolation of information,” concluding that AI-generated animation would be, “as Miyazaki says, an insult to life itself.”

Del Toro escalated his own position further in October 2025. In an interview with NPR‘s Fresh Air promoting his Netflix Frankenstein, Del Toro said simply, “I’d rather die,” when asked his stance on generative AI. “I’m 61, and I hope to be able to remain uninterested in using it at all until I croak.”

Whether Del Toro specifically commented on Gutierrez during the Punky Duck backlash is unclear and not directly confirmed, but the broader weight of senior animation voices speaking out against generative AI created a cultural backdrop that made Gutierrez’s reversal land especially hard. Del Toro famously helped get Gutierrez’s The Book of Life made over a decade ago, which added another personal dimension to the controversy.

The dropout and apology

On Friday morning, Gutierrez posted on X.

“I have decided to drop out of the AI program at Amazon. I will not be making a Punky Duck series. Actions speak louder than words. My intent was to showcase artists, both new and seasoned, both inside and outside the studios, driving this new tech. My sincerest apology to those I upset. I promise to do better moving forward. Thank you for your patience with me. I will try harder.”

The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Amazon for comment.

Bullying or accountability

The situation has split the community.

Many animators argue the criticism was justified. The industry is already dealing with mass layoffs, with the Animation Guild‘s 2024 Critical Crossroads report finding 67% of members opposed AI use in the workplace and 61% extremely concerned about future job prospects. Seeing a prominent creator who had previously denounced AI suddenly partner with Amazon’s flagship generative AI initiative felt to many like a high-profile betrayal that needed public accountability.

Others argue the response went past criticism into intimidation. Death threats, threats against a wife and child, doxxing attempts, and Wikipedia vandalism are not normal discourse. Even some animators who disagreed with Gutierrez’s decision said the level of personal vitriol was disproportionate. The fact that he dropped the project within 48 hours suggests the pressure was overwhelming.

A representative fan reply summed up the more measured pushback. “With respect, people trusted and championed you because you saw what we saw, the theft and the damage to artists and the arts. I think people are shocked and would just like to know why you’ve changed your mind, because you’re one of the last people anyone expected to turn to AI.”

That is the version of the criticism that worked. The threats against Sandra and Luka are the version that did not.

Where this leaves Amazon’s AI animation push

Amazon’s GenAI Creators’ Fund continues with its other announced projects, though both Punky Duck and Cupcake & Friends are now controversial. Brantz, who was laid off from BuzzFeed in January 2024 when The Good Advice Cupcake was cancelled, has called for a boycott of BuzzFeed over the AI series adaptation of her character that she was not consulted on.

Amazon is still moving forward with its Project Nara AI production platform, the Kling AI integration, and the broader infrastructure described by Amazon MGM Head of AI Studios Albert Cheng and AWS GM Samira Bakhtiar as “the only end-to-end AI content creation ecosystem in the industry.”

Gutierrez, meanwhile, has other projects in motion. He is currently developing a long-awaited Speedy Gonzales film with Warner Bros. Pictures Animation, which is presumably continuing with traditional production methods. He did not need Punky Duck to keep working. The cost of staying on it had clearly become higher than the value of the experiment.

What this reveals

The animation industry is in a heated, divided moment over generative AI. Legitimate fears about job loss and the devaluation of craft are real, and the broader labor pushback that produced the Annecy 2025 international anti-AI protest, the Animation Guild AI Committee, and the Brantz boycott is not going away.

At the same time, the response to Gutierrez shows how quickly online outrage can turn personal, and how high-profile creators become targets the moment they engage with controversial technology. The fact that he dropped the project within 48 hours is being treated by some in the industry as a win against AI encroachment, and by others as proof that mob pressure can force someone out before an experiment even begins.

One thing is clear. The cost of publicly experimenting with AI in animation in 2026 is extremely high. In Gutierrez’s case, it appears to have been high enough to make him walk away from a greenlit Prime Video series in less than three days.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming and tech, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, IndieWire, Fast Company, The Wrap, and Bleeding Cool, comprehensive coverage of Gutierrez’s May 29, 2026 dropout announcement, including all verified direct quotes

• Cartoon Brew, original Gutierrez “cautious as possible” Wednesday response

• BlazeTrends, Yahoo Entertainment, and AOL, coverage of the family threats, Wikipedia vandalism, and the deleted Thursday X post including Sandra and Luka by name

• Gutierrez’s own X account (@mexopolis), verified direct posts including the dropout and apology

• IndieWire and Yahoo Entertainment on the May 27 AI on the Lot panel, including the verified “rebellious, punk rock thing” and “life-changer” quotes

• Gutierrez’s 2024 public statements opposing generative AI, including the verified “a whole generation of creators will not be able to make hit movies and series” comment

• NPR Fresh Air interview with Guillermo del Toro (January 30, 2026), the verified “I’d rather die” quote

• Variety coverage of Guillermo del Toro’s 2022 Decider interview, including Del Toro’s endorsement of Miyazaki’s framing

• IndieWire, Kotaku, and 404 Media, the original 2016 Hayao Miyazaki Never-Ending Man NHK documentary clip and the verified “insult to life itself” quote

• AI on the Lot conference (May 27, 2026) panel reporting

The Mandalorian and Grogu has already been overtaken at the box office by a $1 million horror movie called Obsession, and the $10 million A24 movie Backrooms will likely destroy it at the box office this weekend. So not only will a Star Wars movie get toppled at the box office in week 2, but it's getting beaten by movies made on the cheap. So what does that say about the franchise as a whole?

Watch the podcast episode below. (Note: may contain explicit language.)

Valve is jacking up the price of the Steam Deck several hundred dollars, and the word on the street is that the Steam Machine is going to run around $1200. The PS6 and next gen XBOX are rumored to start at around around $1000 as well. And good luck building a gaming PC cheaper. Gamers need to get used to $1000 consoles, because that's where we're at.

Watch the podcast episode below. (Note: may contain explicit language.)

Feminist bloggers are mad that the MCU has killed women, and is complaining in 2026 about all the female deaths from several years ago. Must be a slow news week. They're also complaining about how poorly Star Wars is treating women because The Mandalorian and Grogu featured a mostly male cast.

Watch the podcast episode below. (Note: may contain explicit language.)

Forty-nine years after it opened on 32 movie screens in the United States, the original Star Wars is still the second-highest-grossing film in American history when adjusted for inflation. Estimates of its true worldwide impact in 2026 dollars range from $3 billion to over $4 billion, depending on which inflation calculator and which set of re-releases you include. And nothing Lucasfilm has done in the decades since has come close to matching what George Lucas’s original space opera pulled off in its initial theatrical run.

That gap between the original and everything since has never felt wider than it does this week, with The Mandalorian and Grogu opening to a Disney-era Star Wars low of $98 million domestically over the Memorial Day frame.

How Star Wars actually exploded in 1977

It is hard to overstate how unprepared everyone was for what happened on May 25, 1977.

Twentieth Century Fox opened the film on just 32 screens on a Wednesday, with 11 more theaters added Thursday and Friday for a total of 43 by the opening weekend. Pre-release marketing was minimal. Fox had so little confidence in Star Wars that the studio required theaters that wanted to screen its expected summer hit The Other Side of Midnight to also book Star Wars as part of the package. The Other Side of Midnight is now a trivia answer. Star Wars changed cinema.

Opening day brought in $254,809 from those 32 theaters. The first six-day week pulled $493,774 with a remarkable $15,430 per-screen average. By the end of the second week the lines were wrapping around blocks. One California theater reportedly played the film continuously for 24 hours straight just to handle demand. Theater owners frantically called Fox demanding prints. By week 13 in mid-August, the film was still pulling $11.56 million per week on 1,074 theaters with a domestic gross past $107 million.

The film’s first theatrical run lasted nearly a full year, compared to the four-week average modern movies get today. The original 1977 domestic gross alone hit $307,263,857. By the time you add re-releases in 1979, 1981, 1982, and the 1997 Special Edition, the total domestic gross climbs past $460 million, with a worldwide total around $775 million, per FinanceBuzz data.

In current 2026 dollars, that $460 million-plus translates to over $2 billion in adjusted domestic gross. Worldwide adjusted figures push the total past $3 billion, and some inflation methodologies, including those used by Statista and the Guinness World Records for unadjusted-vs-adjusted comparisons, push that closer to $3.5 billion. The most aggressive estimate, factoring in foreign markets and a generous ticket-price multiplier, puts the original Star Wars at over $4 billion in current money.

The exact number depends on what you count. The conservative read is around $3 billion. Either way, it is staggering.

Star Wars movies ranked by inflation-adjusted worldwide box office

Per FinanceBuzz, Statista, and Yahoo Finance UK‘s 2026-adjusted figures, only three Star Wars films have crossed the $1 billion mark when adjusted for inflation.

• Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977) — over $2 billion domestic / $3 billion+ worldwide adjusted

• Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015) — roughly $1.3 billion adjusted ($2 billion+ unadjusted at the time)

• Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) — just over $1 billion adjusted

• Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983) — high hundreds of millions, just shy of the billion mark

• Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) — roughly $1.7 billion worldwide adjusted per MovieWeb

• Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) — solid mid-tier performer

• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) — over $1 billion unadjusted, solid adjusted figures

• Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) — strong but below sequel-trilogy peer expectations

• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) — $1 billion unadjusted, around $1.2 billion adjusted to 2026 dollars

• Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) — roughly $1.2 billion adjusted, often cited as the weakest of the prequels

• Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) — $393 million unadjusted, $516 million in 2026 dollars per Yahoo Finance UK. The first Star Wars film to lose money theatrically.

• The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026) — projected $350 to $500 million worldwide if it follows the Solo trajectory

The franchise as a whole has grossed roughly $9.9 billion domestically when all numbers are adjusted for inflation, per FinanceBuzz. The final three films on that list account for more than $4 billion of that total.

The top 10 highest-grossing films of all time, domestic, adjusted for inflation

For broader context, here is where the original Star Wars sits in the all-time inflation-adjusted U.S. domestic box office rankings, per Collider, MovieMaker, and the Box Office Mojo-derived consensus. These are domestic figures because reliable international data for pre-1970s films is genuinely hard to assemble.

1. Gone with the Wind (1939) — approximately $1.9 to $4.5 billion depending on methodology, undisputed all-time champion

2. Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977) — roughly $1.7 to $2 billion domestic adjusted

3. The Sound of Music (1965) — approximately $1.5 billion adjusted

4. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) — approximately $1.3 billion adjusted

5. Titanic (1997) — approximately $1.3 billion adjusted

6. The Ten Commandments (1956) — approximately $1.3 billion adjusted

7. Jaws (1975) — approximately $1.2 billion adjusted

8. Doctor Zhivago (1965) — approximately $1.1 billion adjusted

9. The Exorcist (1973) — approximately $1.0 billion adjusted

10. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) — approximately $1.0 billion adjusted

Star Wars is the only modern science-fiction or fantasy film on the list other than E.T. The rest are historical epics, musicals, and one shark movie.

So how did A New Hope build to $3 billion-plus?

The honest answer is that the bulk of the inflation-adjusted total came from the original 1977 run, not the re-releases.

The breakdown of A New Hope’s domestic theatrical history:

• 1977 original release: $307,263,857 (the vast majority of the total)

• 1979 re-release: roughly $10 to $22 million depending on source

• 1981 re-release: similar mid-range numbers

• 1982 re-release: roughly $15.4 million (per MovieWeb)

• 1997 Special Edition re-release: roughly $138 million worldwide ($67 million domestic per Box Office Mojo)

• Recent commemorative screenings: under $1 million combined

The 1977 original release adjusted for inflation alone equals roughly $1.5 billion in 2026 dollars. The 1997 Special Edition was a substantial second wind, but it added a fraction of what the original run pulled. The bulk of the adjusted total comes from the fact that ticket prices in 1977 averaged around $2.23 per ticket, and Star Wars sold an estimated 140 million tickets in its initial run alone in the U.S. and Canada. That is roughly 63% of the entire U.S. population at the time.

For comparison, The Force Awakens sold roughly 108 million tickets in its much shorter 2015 theatrical window, at an average ticket price around $8.50. The Mandalorian and Grogu will likely sell 9 to 14 million tickets domestically over its full theatrical run.

The original Star Wars did not just win at the box office. It rewired what a box office hit looked like, what summer blockbusters were, what merchandising could mean, and what science fiction could be commercially. That cultural footprint is built into the adjusted number in a way no modern release can replicate because the moviegoing pattern that produced it, with audiences seeing the same film 8 or 10 or 15 times in theaters, no longer exists.

How anemic the Mandalorian and Grogu opening really looks

Set against this history, The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s $98 million four-day Memorial Day opening looks worse than a single number can convey.

The original Star Wars opened on 32 screens and went on to dominate the world. The Mandalorian and Grogu opened on 4,300 screens, after seven years of franchise hype, with a built-in Disney+ audience of tens of millions, with the actor playing the title role as a current pop culture force, and with Jon Favreau behind the camera. And it pulled in less than Solo‘s 2018 four-day opening in unadjusted dollars, and substantially less when adjusted.

Put differently, on a per-screen basis the original Star Wars in 1977 averaged $50,000 per theater on its opening weekend. The Mandalorian and Grogu averaged $19,060 in 2026, with all the modern advantages of premium-large-format pricing, IMAX upcharges, and Memorial Day holiday traffic baked in. Even before inflation, the per-screen comparison is brutal.

The franchise still has Pedro Pascal. It still has new content in development. Star Wars: Starfighter with Ryan Gosling and Shawn Levy arrives Memorial Day 2027. Star Wars is not going away.

But the era when Star Wars was the biggest science fiction franchise on Earth, without competition, is over. The original was the cultural event that defined modern blockbusters. The current entries are competent franchise extensions playing in a market crowded with Marvel, DC, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, Avatar, and a dozen streaming-era equivalents. Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012 expecting to keep producing Force Awakens-sized hits forever. Fourteen years and many billions of dollars later, the data show what actually happened.

Star Wars used to be the franchise. Now it is one of several. The $3 billion-plus that the original made, in any era’s money, is the high water mark. Everything since has been measured against it. Most things have come up short.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming and tech, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• FinanceBuzz Star Wars Day 2026 deep dive, primary source for total adjusted franchise gross, A New Hope re-release breakdowns, and adjusted billion-dollar threshold rankings

• Statista Star Wars box office charts, worldwide adjusted figures for the Skywalker saga

• Yahoo Finance UK (May 2026), inflation-adjusted 2026 figures for Solo and Attack of the Clones

• Box Office Mojo, week-by-week 1977 domestic box office data and historical re-release records

• Collider, MovieMaker, and CBR, all-time domestic inflation-adjusted top 10 rankings

• MovieWeb, detailed 1977, 1982, and 1997 A New Hope re-release breakdowns

• Guinness World Records, Gone with the Wind and A New Hope historical context including the 1939 ticket sales data and global adjusted estimates

• The Wrap (May 2026), comprehensive Star Wars box office crash course tied to The Mandalorian and Grogu‘s release

• Episode Nothing: Star Wars in the 1970s blog and The Week In Nerd, original 1977 release theater list and historical anecdotes

• Stephen Tracy on Medium, multi-year Star Wars franchise box office analysis with adjusted figures

• TimeGenius, 1977 first-run anecdotes including the 24-hour California theater and weekend record details

Scroll through TikTok or Instagram and you will see it constantly. Young people posting “POV: going to the mall in 2007” or “this is what arcades used to be like.” Gen Z and younger Millennials are expressing a clear desire for the physical, social spaces their parents and older siblings grew up with. They want the fluorescent-lit corridors, the food courts, the loud arcades filled with the sound of quarters dropping and joysticks clicking.

The problem is that a huge number of those places no longer exist in the form they remember, or at all.

The American mall is fading in real time

Indoor shopping malls were once the undisputed center of American suburban life. From the 1970s through the early 2000s, they were where teenagers hung out, families shopped, and communities gathered. The numbers in 2026 tell a very different story.

There were over 2,500 malls in the U.S. at the format’s peak in the 1980s. As of 2025, roughly 1,200 malls remain, according to Capital One research. By 2028, that number is projected to fall to 900, and some long-range estimates have it dropping further, with as much as 87% of large shopping malls potentially closing over the next decade. A new mega mall has not been built in the U.S. since 2006.

The national mall vacancy rate is roughly 112% higher than the overall retail vacancy rate, with one analysis pegging it at 248% in 2024. Class C malls, the lowest-tier properties, are seeing vacancy rates above 13%. The average dead mall sells for about 43% below its acquisition price.

2025 was an especially brutal year for mall anchors

According to Coresight Research, more than 8,100 stores closed across the U.S. in 2025, up roughly 12% from 2024. Some projections suggest closures could escalate further in 2026.

The casualty list of major retailers in 2025 alone is staggering. Party City shuttered all 700 locations. Joann closed all 800 stores after a second bankruptcy in a year. Rite Aid ceased operations entirely with all pharmacy locations closed by October. Forever 21 closed 354 stores and permanently exited the U.S. market after its second bankruptcy. Claire’s closed over 290 stores while navigating its own bankruptcy.

Even surviving retailers are pulling back hard. Macy’s announced plans to close 150 underperforming stores through the end of 2026 as part of its “Bold New Chapter” strategy, with 14 additional locations closing in early 2026 following 66 closures in 2025. JCPenney closed at least 8 more stores in 2025, adding to over 200 total closures since its 2020 bankruptcy filing.

How malls actually died, step by step

The collapse was not one event. It was a chain reaction.

E-commerce changed expectations. Amazon and online shopping did not just take market share. They reshaped what consumers expect from buying anything. Why drive to the mall when you can get almost anything delivered the next day, often cheaper?

Anchor stores collapsed. Major department stores like Sears, JCPenney, and Macy’s were the economic engines of malls. When they started closing stores en masse, it created a death spiral. Fewer anchors meant less foot traffic, which meant smaller stores could not survive either. Crucially, co-tenancy clauses in many leases allowed smaller retailers to terminate leases or demand rent reductions when anchors departed, creating a domino effect.

Demographics shifted. Younger generations have less disposable income for traditional retail. They also socialize differently, through phones and social media rather than physical hangouts. The classic “mall rat” culture largely disappeared.

Operating costs ballooned. Large indoor malls are expensive to heat, cool, maintain, and secure. When vacancy rates climb, those fixed costs get spread across fewer tenants, driving rents up or forcing closures.

COVID-19 delivered the death blow. The pandemic accelerated everything. Store closures during lockdowns combined with the permanent shift to online shopping pushed marginal properties over the edge.

Not all malls are dying, but the survivors are different

Some malls are not just surviving but thriving by reinventing themselves.

Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota remains one of the strongest properties in the country and is constantly adding new attractions. American Dream in East Rutherford, New Jersey bet heavily on entertainment alongside retail and has become a major regional destination. Aventura Mall in Florida, King of Prussia in Pennsylvania, and high-end centers like NorthPark Center in Dallas continue to do well by focusing on luxury brands and experiential retail.

According to McKinsey‘s State of Fashion 2026 report, luxury retail square footage in the U.S. rose 65% in the first half of 2025, reflecting a clear barbell strategy where high-end and dollar-store retail thrives while middle-tier mall stores get crushed.

Many struggling malls are being converted into something else entirely. According to Capital One data, 46% of mall redevelopments are now mixed-use projects that include some retail. 9% of vacant malls have become warehouses. 7% have become residential housing. 5% became delivery or distribution centers. 4% became community college or university spaces. Another 4% became healthcare or medical facilities.

The version of the mall Gen Z is nostalgic for, the enclosed, anchor-driven shopping cathedral with a food court and a movie theater, is structurally obsolete.

The death of the American arcade was a slow burn

Arcades followed a similar trajectory, though for different reasons.

The golden age of arcades, from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, was killed by a combination of market saturation, the 1983 video game crash, and most importantly, the rise of home consoles. Once kids could play Pac-Man, Street Fighter II, or Mortal Kombat at home, the need to go to a public arcade diminished. By the 1990s and 2000s, most standalone arcades had closed. The survivors often became attached to bowling alleys, movie theaters, or family entertainment centers like Chuck E. Cheese.

The retro arcade revival is real but extremely fragile

In recent years there has been a genuine nostalgia-driven revival, helped enormously by pop culture. Stranger Things turned the fictional Palace Arcade into a character in its own right, with Dig Dug and Dragon’s Lair cabinets shot like cathedral interiors. The Goldbergs leaned on a pizzeria full of Donkey Kong machines repeatedly. The new Stranger Things spinoff in 2026 leans even harder on cabinet imagery than the main show ever did.

Enthusiasts and small business owners have opened retro-focused arcades featuring original cabinets, pinball machines, and classic games. The successes are real.

Galloping Ghost Arcade in Brookfield, Illinois bills itself as the largest video arcade in the U.S., with over 885 games. The venue runs on a flat $25 door fee with all games set to free play, has tracked over 600 world records, and stays open until 2 a.m. on weekends. Pinballz in Austin, Texas operates multiple BYOB locations with over 250 games each. Barcade, which opened its first Brooklyn location in 2004, essentially invented the modern barcade format.

But the failure rate is just as real. Highest Score Arcade in Salisbury, England opened in August 2024 and closed in June 2025 due to running costs and low footfall. The community raised over £3,000 in two days to keep it open, and it briefly reopened, only to close for good at the end of September 2025. Owner James Petherick put it bluntly to the BBC. “On a financial basis, it just hasn’t worked.”

Retro Replay Arcade in Peoria, Illinois, which billed itself as a 1990s gamer paradise, opened on New Year’s Eve 2023 and closed before its first anniversary.

Even successful retro spots operate on razor-thin margins. Industry site Arcade Heroes has been openly advising operators to avoid common pitfalls. Do not start a free-play arcade with fewer than 40 games. Offer food, sports games, or other attractions to keep people around. Be willing to adjust the business model if things are not working. Open somewhere accessible with decent foot traffic, which is harder than ever.

The challenges are structural. High rent for the large spaces needed. The cost and difficulty of maintaining 30 to 40-year-old machines. Competition from home gaming, emulation, and modern entertainment options. Electricity bills that have ballooned in recent years.

Dave & Buster’s, Chuck’s Arcade, and barcades are not what arcades were

This is an important distinction Gen Z often misses when they romanticize the past.

Dave & Buster’s is primarily a restaurant and bar with an attached game room. The focus is on ticket-redemption games, the modern descendants of skee-ball and claw machines, some newer video games, and alcohol sales. It is clean, well-lit, family-friendly during the day, and very much a chain experience.

Barcades are adult-oriented spaces where the primary product is alcohol. The games are often a curated mix of classics and modern titles, but the atmosphere is fundamentally different from the dark, loud, slightly grimy, kid-and-teen-focused arcades of the 1980s and 1990s.

Chuck’s Arcade, launched on June 30, 2025 as an adult-targeted spinoff of Chuck E. Cheese, takes a hybrid approach. The new chain has already opened in over 10 locations across 8 states, including St. Petersburg, Florida, Trumbull, Connecticut, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Victor, New York, Buford, Georgia, El Paso, Texas, Nashua and Salem, New Hampshire, St. Louis, and a Brea Mall location in California. The mix is intentional. Ms. Pac-Man, Galaga, Mortal Kombat, Donkey Kong, and Centipede sit alongside modern titles like Jurassic Park, Halo, NERF-themed games, racing simulators, and VR. Pizza and costumed mascots are gone, but the animatronic characters remain.

None of these formats really recreates the original arcade experience. Walking in with a pocket full of quarters. The smell of popcorn and cleaning fluid. The constant sound of machines. The social pressure and performance of playing in front of strangers. The unsupervised teenage chaos of a 1990s mall arcade is structurally incompatible with modern liability, real estate economics, and family entertainment center business models.

The “third place” problem nobody can solve

Gen Z’s desire for malls and arcades is real and understandable. Social media has turned these spaces into aesthetic and cultural touchstones. There is also a genuine hunger for “third places,” the term sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined for physical locations outside of home, school, or work where people can gather without spending a fortune or staring at screens the whole time.

The problem is structural. The economic and cultural conditions that created and sustained traditional malls and arcades no longer exist in the same way. Affordable commercial real estate, anchor-tenant economics, mass disposable income among teenagers, and a baseline cultural assumption that you would go somewhere to be around other people without a specific purchase agenda, those conditions have eroded simultaneously.

Some reinvention is happening. A few malls are successfully pivoting toward experiences and mixed-use development. A handful of dedicated retro arcades continue to operate, often subsidized by enthusiast owners who treat the venue more like a passion project than a serious business. Chuck E. Cheese is making a real bet on adult nostalgia with Chuck’s Arcade. Dan Bell‘s Dead Mall Series on YouTube has racked up millions of views, with Bell noting that young viewers approach abandoned malls with “shock and awe at the same time. It’s like watching the Titanic sink.”

Gen Z can visit what remains, or help support the places trying to bring some of that spirit back. But the version they are nostalgic for largely belongs to a different era, one that is not coming back in its original form.

The mall and the arcade as third places worked because of a specific alignment of cheap rent, cheap labor, cheap power, cheap teenage social capital, and a pre-smartphone culture where being around other people was the default. None of those inputs are coming back anytime soon.

Nostalgia is not a business model. And the people who learned that the hard way have the closed-storefront receipts to prove it.

Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.

D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming and tech, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.

Hat Tips:

• Capital One Shopping research on U.S. mall closure statistics, vacancy rates, and projected closures through 2028

• The Science Survey and Newsweek coverage of 2025 retail vacancy rates and the “dead mall” repurposing trend

• Coresight Research and Cushman & Wakefield data on 2025 store closures, retail leasing weakness, and major bankruptcies including Party City, Joann, Rite Aid, Forever 21, and Claire’s

• Coldwell Banker Commercial analysis of why some malls thrive while others collapse, including Macy’s “Bold New Chapter” strategy and McKinsey’s State of Fashion 2026 report

• AOL, MassLive, and USA Today coverage of 2025 store closures by retailer

• Time magazine’s interview with Dan Bell of YouTube’s Dead Mall Series on Gen Z’s relationship with abandoned malls

• Arcade Heroes and Time Extension, monthly location watch coverage of arcade openings and closures, plus operational best practices for retro arcade owners

• BBC and Journal Star reporting on the Highest Score Arcade closure in Salisbury and Retro Replay Arcade closure in Peoria

• Fortune, Parade, and Los Angeles Times coverage of the June 2025 launch of Chuck’s Arcade and its expansion to 10 locations

• Galloping Ghost Arcade and Pinballz official site information on operating models and game counts

• The Movie Blog and GameSpace on the cultural role of streaming TV in driving arcade nostalgia, including Stranger Things and The Goldbergs

Google hates you, apparently. And me. And everyone on the internet. But especially journalists, according to journalists. Yes, Google AI search will collapse digital journalism as we know it. And NPR is also laying off more staff. These things are likely related.

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Spyro the Dragon has been found! A long lost giant Spyro statue from Sony's 2000 E3 was tucked away in an Oregon gas station, and he was located by some "urban archeologists" who happened to be big Spyro fans. There is much rejoicing on the internet. So where's Spyro 4? Or a new Skylanders?

Watch the podcast episode below. (Note: may contain explicit language.)

Disney's latest Star Wars movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu, came in under $100 million for the four day weekend. That's several million dollars less than what was being reported, and it shows ticket sales slowed down as the weekend dragged on. And they're blaming the PANDEMIC. In 2026.

Watch the podcast episode below. (Note: may contain explicit language.)