‘Backrooms’ and ‘Obsession’ Beat ‘Mandalorian and Grogu’

Suddenly movie theaters are hot again — and the excitement is coming from an unexpected place.

Theaters are buzzing with two different original horror movies filling up auditoriums at the exact same time: A24’s Backrooms and Focus’ Obsession. Both films had a huge weekend at the box office; Backrooms became A24’s biggest opening ever and set a record for the biggest debut for an original horror movie ever. Its director, Kane Parsons, is only 20 years old making him the youngest director in history with a #1 box office hit.

Meanwhile, another low-budget horror movie, Curry Barker’s Obsession, continues to defy the traditional box office trends and increased its ticket sales for the third straight weekend. Fueled by great word of mouth among young audiences, the film went from a $17.1 million opening two weekends ago, to $23.9 million last weekend to $26.4 this weekend — even as it was competing for the same audience with Backrooms.

The film has already earned well over $100 million in U.S. theaters alone, making it the biggest Focus Features release ever.

A24

The most surprising and maybe the most notable part of this success is that these little horror movies, made on tiny budgets by young directors making the jump from YouTube videos to the big screen, trounced what most experts predicted would be one of the biggest hits of the summer: The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first new Star Wars movie in multiplexes in seven years.

In its second weekend of release, The Mandalorian and Grogu earned an estimated $25 million in domestic theaters — meaning it came in third place behind Backrooms and Obsession. It had a larger drop, percentage-wise, than Solo: A Star Wars Story, and potentially remains on track to become the lowest-grossing Disney Star Wars movie to date.

For many years, Hollywood conventional wisdom (especially since Covid) held the only films that made money in theaters anymore were big “event film” — new installments of well-established franchises with large fanbases. This weekend’s box-office totals completely upend that belief. The “event” in theaters last weekend was two different little horror movies, driving in tons of young audiences — the same audience that supposedly doesn’t care about theaters or seeing things on a big screen.

Maybe movie theaters aren’t so doomed after all. (Star Wars might actually be in a little trouble, though.)