The first Star Wars movie in seven years just got beaten at the box office by a horror film a 20-year-old made for less than the catering budget of a tentpole. Over the weekend of May 29, A24’s Backrooms opened to $81.4 million domestically while Disney’s The Mandalorian and Grogu collapsed about 69 percent in its second frame to roughly $25 million. A second indie horror release, Obsession, kept climbing. Two films built for a combined budget near $11 million outdrew a Lucasfilm release that cost $165 million to make.
The easy read is another Star Wars stumble. The signal underneath it is harder for Hollywood to wave off: a generation of directors trained on YouTube has worked out how to fill theaters without franchise armor, and they are doing it at margins the major studios have not seen in years.
Two Horror Films Outdrew a $165 Million Star Wars
The head-to-head numbers are the story. Backrooms, the debut feature from Kane Parsons, landed the biggest opening in A24’s 14-year history with $81.4 million in the United States and $118 million worldwide, pulling from 3,442 theaters. Obsession, Curry Barker’s micro-budget chiller for Focus Features, rose again in its third weekend to $26.4 million and pushed past $104 million domestically. Both came in ahead of where The Mandalorian and Grogu sat after its own collapse.
Jon Favreau’s film opened to $81.7 million over three days and roughly $98 million across the four-day Memorial Day corridor, a series low for a theatrical Star Wars picture. It then dropped about 69 percent, falling short even of Solo: A Star Wars Story, the 2018 spin-off long treated as the franchise’s commercial floor. By the end of the weekend its domestic total stood at $137.3 million against a worldwide haul of $246.6 million.
Here is how the three films compare on the only metric that matters for this argument, money in versus money out, as of the weekend of May 29 to 31.
| Film | Distributor | Reported production budget | Domestic gross to date | Worldwide gross to date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backrooms | A24 | Under $10 million | $81.4 million | $118 million |
| Obsession | Focus Features | About $1 million | $104.7 million | $148 million |
| The Mandalorian and Grogu | Disney / Lucasfilm | $165 million | $137.3 million | $246.6 million |
Where the Franchise Moat Cracked
For two decades, the studio playbook treated owned intellectual property (IP, the rights to a known character or world) as a guarantee. Bolt a recognizable logo onto a $150-million-plus production, spend another nine figures on marketing, and the audience shows up on reputation alone. The Mandalorian and Grogu is the clearest test yet of whether that still holds.
The film carried a $165 million negative cost on top of a global marketing campaign that people close to Disney put at $100 million or more. To clear its accounts, the picture needs to gross somewhere between $500 million to $600 million worldwide. After two weekends it has banked under half the low end of that range, and the steep second-weekend drop suggests the front-loaded demand has already burned off. Our earlier coverage flagged the soft Star Wars opening as a box office reckoning before the second-weekend figures landed.
None of that is fatal on its own. Star Wars remains a durable brand, and a long international tail could still narrow the gap. But the franchise’s pull is supposed to come precisely from its size, the spectacle that only a nine-figure budget can buy. When a movie that expensive gets passed in week two by titles costing a fraction as much, the premium starts to look like a liability rather than a shield.
That is the crack. The moat was never the lightsabers. It was the belief that audiences would reliably pay for scale, and that belief is what this weekend dented.
The YouTube-Trained Directors Behind the Surge
The two filmmakers eating Disney’s lunch did not come up through film school or the studio assistant grind. They built audiences on a free video platform first, then walked into theaters with crowds already attached.
Kane Parsons and the Backrooms Pipeline
Parsons, born in 2005, started uploading his Backrooms analog-horror shorts to his Kane Pixels channel in January 2022, when he was 16. The series, set in an infinite maze of humming fluorescent lights and yellow wallpaper, has drawn more than 197 million views and turned a creepypasta urban legend into a recognizable property. A24 had been talking to him about a feature since he was still in high school.
The result made him, at 20, the youngest filmmaker ever to direct a number-one movie at the domestic box office, a record previously held by Josh Trank, who was 27 when Chronicle opened atop the chart in 2012. Parsons surrounded himself with adults who knew the room, casting Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass and bringing in producers including James Wan and Shawn Levy. The audience, though, came from his own Kane Pixels horror channel.
Curry Barker’s Slow Climb
Barker followed a parallel route. A horror sketch and short-film creator with a loyal following, he made Obsession for roughly $1 million for Focus Features. The film opened modestly, then did something almost no movie does anymore: it grew. Word of mouth, much of it spreading through the same online horror communities Barker came from, kept turning over fresh ticket buyers week after week.
Neither director needed a legacy brand. What they had instead was a direct line to the Gen Z viewers studios keep saying they cannot reach, an audience they spent years cultivating one upload at a time.
The Margin Math Studios Envy
Strip away the headlines and the disruption is an accounting story. A film that grosses $118 million on a sub-$10 million budget is in profit before the second weekend even posts. A film that grosses $246.6 million on a $165 million budget plus a nine-figure marketing spend is still climbing toward break-even and may never reach it.
The lopsided economics are why this weekend rattled people who track the business closely.
- Under $10 million built Backrooms, which has already returned more than ten times its production cost worldwide.
- About $1 million built Obsession, now grossing past $148 million globally and the highest earner in Focus Features history, ahead of the $96.8 million domestic run of 2019’s Downton Abbey.
- $265 million or more in combined production and marketing sits behind The Mandalorian and Grogu, which needs to roughly double its current global total just to stop losing money.
That contrast is the trap several analysts have been warning about, and it is the same pattern we examined when an indie horror box office surge exposed Hollywood’s IP problem earlier this cycle. The genre has quietly become the most efficient corner of the theatrical market, and the platforms that incubate its directors are free.
The Word-of-Mouth Engine Hollywood Forgot
The most telling number this weekend was not an opening figure. It was a hold. Obsession rose roughly 10 percent in its third frame, the first film since Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1982 to post back-to-back weekend increases in its second and third weekends outside a holiday corridor. Movies are supposed to fall. This one accelerated.
Three records fell across the same slate, and together they map where the energy in the theater business has moved.
- A24 booked its largest opening ever with Backrooms at $81.4 million, more than triple the studio’s prior best, Alex Garland’s Civil War, which managed $25.5 million in 2024.
- Parsons became the youngest director to top the domestic chart, breaking a record that had stood since 2012.
- Obsession joined E.T. in a 44-year-old club of films that climbed rather than dropped through their crucial early weekends.
What links all three is momentum that the studios cannot buy: an audience that wants to see a movie again and tells other people to go. That is the engine the tentpole model traded away when it started front-loading everything into opening weekend.
What the Indie Win Can and Cannot Fix
The temptation now is to declare the franchise era over and the indie director the new king. That overstates it. One weekend, however lopsided, does not rewrite an industry, and the economics that make Backrooms and Obsession look like miracles are exactly the economics a $200 million production can never reproduce. A studio cannot will a 197-million-view fanbase into existence, and it cannot make a global event movie for $1 million.
There is also a survivorship problem. For every Parsons or Barker who converts an online following into a theatrical smash, dozens of cheap horror films open and vanish. The genre’s hit rate looks dazzling this month because the misses do not generate headlines. Cheap is not the same as guaranteed.
What the weekend does prove is narrower and more useful. The link between budget and box office, once treated as close to absolute, has come loose, and the talent pipeline now runs through YouTube as much as through the studios. Disney can still rescue The Mandalorian and Grogu with a strong overseas run and a Season 4 of the series that Favreau has already scripted; the brand is not dead. But the assumption that scale alone fills seats took real damage this Memorial Day.
If Backrooms holds through June and Obsession keeps climbing, the next round of greenlights starts tilting toward young directors with built-in audiences and budgets that fit on a single page. If both fade fast, the studios will tell themselves it was a fluke and keep writing nine-figure checks. The receipts from the next three weekends decide which lesson Hollywood actually learns.
