Masters of the Universe box office craters 68% in second weekend
He-Man's reboot is on track for one of the year's biggest losses, the second straight tentpole flop after The Mandalorian & Grogu. Two YouTube-budget horror movies are beating them both.
Masters of the Universe is in free fall. Deadline projects the Amazon MGM He-Man reboot will pull just $9.4 million in its second weekend, a brutal 68% drop from its already-soft opening, sliding all the way to fifth place.
That brings the domestic total to roughly $47.4 million through two weekends. The production budget, per Variety, ran around $200 million before marketing. You don’t need the spreadsheet to see the shape of that. This is heading for one of the bigger theatrical losses Hollywood has booked in years.
The international picture is somehow worse. The film opened to $25 million overseas across 86 territories and, by the latest figures, that number has barely moved. For a globally recognized toy brand, a frozen foreign box office is the kind of red flag that ends franchises before they start.
The He-Man flop has company
Here’s the part that should worry studios more than any single movie. MOTU isn’t an outlier this summer. It’s the second tentpole in a row to face-plant.
The Mandalorian & Grogu opened to a soft $81 million over Memorial Day weekend, then collapsed about 70% in its second frame, landing in third place. Reports peg its all-in cost near $300 million, with a break-even somewhere around $500 million worldwide that it’s now very unlikely to reach.
A Star Wars theatrical movie, fading this fast, is its own kind of alarm bell. Variety’s read was blunt: the property isn’t reaching much beyond an aging core of fans.
Two expensive, brand-name, four-quadrant tentpoles. Both bombing. Back to back. That’s not a fluke, that’s a pattern.
The movies actually winning are insane
While the big swings whiff, the cheap seats are cleaning up.
Backrooms, directed by 20-year-old YouTube creator Kane Parsons off his web series, was made for around $10 million and has blown past $200 million worldwide. It’s now A24’s highest-grossing movie ever. Obsession, from 26-year-old YouTube-and-TikTok filmmaker Curry Barker, reportedly cost somewhere around $750,000 and has crossed $200 million globally, out-earning The Mandalorian & Grogu domestically in the process.
Sit with that math for a second. A Star Wars movie with a nine-figure budget got beaten in America by a horror flick that cost less than the catering. Two of them did.
The lesson keeps writing itself in 2026: audiences will show up huge for something fresh and word-of-mouth-driven, and they’ll skip the warmed-over IP no matter how big the logo. The same crowd raised on YouTube that turned out for A Minecraft Movie is turning out for YouTube directors. The brands are the ones eating it.
The slate that’s supposed to fix this hasn’t yet
The standard industry comfort is that the summer’s real heavy hitters were always loaded into mid-June and July. The catch is that none of them have proven anything, and a couple are walking into the same buzzsaw.
Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi disclosure movie Disclosure Day opened June 12, and it carries the heaviest expectations of the bunch, because if anyone is supposed to be flop-proof it’s Spielberg directing an alien-contact picture into the most UFO-obsessed news cycle in decades. Its early numbers are the summer’s next real test.
Pixar’s Toy Story 5 arrives June 19.
DC’s Supergirl lands June 26 already trailing a soft tracking number and a heavily recut runtime, the next superhero release with something to prove.
Disney’s Moana remake follows July 10, another live-action redo dropping into a year that has not been kind to expensive familiar things.
Analysts remain broadly optimistic, and they’re not wrong to be. Comscore’s Paul Dergarabedian has pointed to the sheer density of huge films and the marketing muscle behind them, and there’s a real case the season still hits $4 billion. Moviegoing itself is healthy. People are clearly going to the movies. They’re just going to the right movies, and increasingly that means the surprise over the sequel.
So the box office isn’t broken. The blockbuster formula might be. Two tentpoles are already smoking craters, two indie kids are lapping them, and the films meant to bail out the season are now auditioning for the job in real time.
He-Man had the power. The kids with the camcorders have it now.
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, tech, and pop culture, 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 via Yahoo (June 12, 2026), verified for the projected 68% second-weekend drop, the $9.4 million weekend, and the $47.4 million running total
Variety (June 2026), verified for the ~$200 million production budget, the Mandalorian 70% drop and “aging core” assessment, and the Backrooms and Obsession grosses
Fortune (June 7, 2026), verified for the Mattel/Barbie comparison and the Backrooms worldwide total
SlashFilm (June 2026), verified for the competitive-crowding analysis and the must-see-buzz framing
OutKick (June 2026), verified for the Mandalorian budget, break-even estimate, and opening figures
Axios (May 2026), verified for the Dergarabedian summer outlook and the upcoming slate
ComicBook.com (June 2026), verified for the summer release calendar and the IMAX-screen conflict between MOTU and Mandalorian