Star Wars used to crush horror movies. Now horror movies are crushing Star Wars
Obsession, made for under $1 million, just had a historic second weekend. Backrooms is tracking to nearly double Mandalorian and Grogu’s opening with a $10 million budget.
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.
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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