It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
Disney seemingly had a lock on the start of summer movie season with the release of “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” its first “Star Wars” movie in seven years. With its only competition at the box office being a low-budget horror movie and a big-screen version of a 4chan meme, it would certainly reign supreme for weeks, right?
Wrong.
Fast-forward to the start of June, and “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” has been blasted to smithereens by the horror sensation “Obsession” and A24’s latest hit “Backrooms.”
As they say in the “Star Wars” galaxy: “I have a bad feeling about this.”
‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ is the first ‘Star Wars’ movie to fail to dominate the box office in back-to-back weekends
Disney
Things weren’t going well for “The Mandalorian and Grogu” right out of the gate. The movie earned $167 million at the worldwide box office over Memorial Day weekend, making it the lowest opening ever for a “Star Wars” movie.
Things only got worse in the middle of last week, when the movie lost its number one spot to “Obsession,” a horror movie about a love story gone wrong that was made for around $1 million by a newbie director and had already been in theaters for close to two weeks.
The death blow came this weekend, when Mando didn’t just lose to “Backrooms,” a big-screen extension of YouTuber Kane Parsons’ popular horror shorts, but to both films, falling all the way to third place.
Focus Features
Mando’s dismal performance marks the end of the golden touch “Star Wars” has had on the box office for decades. “The Mandalorian and Grogu” is the first-ever “Star Wars” live-action theatrical release to not hold the number one spot at the domestic box office for at least two weekends (that’s right, even “Solo: A Star Wars Story” topped the box office for two weekends).
Audiences’ lack of interest in a “Star Wars” movie must be alarming for executives at Disney. The company purchased “Star Wars” production company Lucasfilm for $4 billion in 2012, and until now, that was considered money well spent. But there is clearly a disturbance in the Force.
I opined last week that Mando’s box-office slump could be due to the franchise’s pivot to television after the release of 2019’s “The Rise of Skywalker.” But it could also be that Hollywood is on the brink of a seismic shift, one that the industry hasn’t seen since George Lucas and his “Movie Brat” brethren transformed the business with their radical stories in the 1970s.
Original movies can be money-makers, too
A24
It’s becoming clearer that Hollywood, and particularly the movie business, is entering an originality renaissance.
Similar to when audiences tired of the stale song-and-dance films the industry was outputting in the 1960s — opening the door for more original storytelling from the likes of Lucas, Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese — it seems we have hit a point where audiences have grown tired of franchises and cinematic universes and are seeking more challenging stories that push the envelope.
This didn’t happen overnight or over a few weekends. Though “Obsession” and “Backrooms” are getting a lot of attention — rightfully so for their box-office dominance — the reality is this has been brewing for at least a year. Not only did 2025 movies like “Sinners,” “Weapons,” and best picture winner “One Battle After Another” (the highest-grossing movie ever for its director, Paul Thomas Anderson) all earn critical and awards-season acclaim, but all overperformed at the box office.
The point is, audiences have been opening their wallets to tell Hollywood what they want for some time now. And it’s not something they’ve seen already on TV or get a version of every other year on the big screen.
Warner Bros.
That’s not to say blockbusters and franchises are a thing of the past. It’s just that the success of original movies leads to more options for moviegoers, which leads to a more robust industry overall. It’s a blueprint executives in the movie theater business have been pleading for since the end of the pandemic.
One studio is even putting its money where its mouth is. At CinemaCon in April, Warner Bros., which was behind the release of “Sinners,” “Weapons,” and “One Battle After Another,” announced the launch of Clockwork, a specialty label focused on in-house project development, acquisitions, and restorations, all receiving worldwide theatrical releases. The label has already locked in the next release from writer-director Sean Baker, whose movie “Anora” won five Oscars in 2025.
At the Produced By conference over the weekend, Warner Bros. co-chair Michael De Luca spoke about the importance of telling original stories.
“If you don’t look for new voices and new talent, and you rely on what’s worked before, innovation dies,” he said. “If you cut too deep, your pipeline dries up and you don’t have enough movies.”
“Star Wars” will have its comeback. People will come out in droves to see the next “Toy Story.” People are chomping at the bit to see “Avengers: Doomsday” at the end of the year. But what the last year-plus has shown us is that when the studios allow originality to have a seat at the table, the industry thrives.
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