First weekend of June 2026

There are a lot of positive headlines in the box-office this weekend, and since this weekend last year was pretty tepid (Ballerina, The Phoenician Scheme) we’ll probably be more than 50% ahead of last year and add to the 12% lead we’ve got on the 2025 cume. But because we’ve got a bonafide phenomenon going on between Backrooms and Obsession, there are a couple of comps that are pretty eye opening. One of the benchmarks that comes up every now and then is comping the current box-office to 2019, our last full year before the shutdown and it usually comes up pretty short. But last week we were ahead of the same weekend in 2019 (Godzilla King of the Monsters, Rocket Man, Ma) and we’ll beat 2019 this weekend too (Secret Life of Pets 2, Dark Phoenix); plus last weekend was actually up from Memorial Day weekend, so as the old saying goes ‘there’s nothing wrong with this business that a couple of good pictures won’t solve’. It’s pretty bright for the next couple of weeks as well, and other than the 4th of July being on Saturday (which isn’t usually a very good day and can be very rough on a film like Minions), we are looking up for the rest of the summer. And we’re even going to have a really good weekend this weekend after the short sighted folks at Universal took down AMC yesterday by having their presale for Odyssey on a day where a lot of tickets are bought for the weekend.

I got a lot of responses to last week’s email, and a lot of the responses were about YouTube as a new IP source for Theatrical; followed by ‘just kill me now’. Because we’re already in a sector that has to sift through an insane amount of material to find something worth making*, adding a source that has hundreds of thousands (or maybe millions) of options could be viewed as good news, but it’s very daunting. However, the beauty of this source is that there’s actually current popularity data attached to it, so if there’s a decent idea and it’s got a lot of views it’s a valid starting point, and then saying ‘we can make this into a decent movie for today’ has some current relevance. As opposed to pointing toward TV ratings from a series that ran in the early 80’s and saying ‘we can make this into a decent movie for today’.

As my High School Writing Teacher used to say in assignments ‘Compare and Contrast’, the box-office gods have given us a weekend this weekend where we can do just that. On the heels of two fresh takes on old ideas assisted by new media, Obsession is Fatal Attraction and Backrooms is The Shining, this weekend we’ve gone back the same old same old thing we’ve been doing for a while and have a couple of IP’s that seem pretty tired. The Compare and Contrast aspect that might be worth examining here is how each film got to this point.

With Obsession, it was made with (very little) Independent money, and once the film was finished it was purchased at TIFF by Focus, who knocked it out of the park marketing wise. Backrooms was made at a very low price, but with a studio like A24 that still has one foot firmly in their independent roots and prides themselves as the ‘weird’ studio, there’s an infrastructure there that allows a film like this to breathe, and of course A24 leveraged the IP fanbase for a gross that’s a new high water mark. But in each case there was a structure that allowed a filmmaker to create, instead of saying ‘make it like this film’.

Now let’s take a look at the two films opening this weekend, and the path to theaters in the Studio system is much harder. It probably takes fewer signatures to launch the Space Shuttle than it does to get a Greenlight at a major studio (probably not, but go with me here), and there’s a reason for that; they’ve been around long enough that they’ve been burned…a lot. And once you get burned, you start putting guardrails up so you don’t get burned again, but often all those added layers of protection just drag everything to the middle. That’s probably why we’ve swung so hard towards IP’s that resonate in that very big room a film has to pass through. Sequels, TV IP, Remakes, it’s all got to resonate in the room with people who need to attach the idea with something they know, and those IP’s have had enough success Theatrically that it feels fiscally responsible to do it. I’ve heard from some of you that certain studios were saying for a while ‘we won’t hear any pitch that doesn’t have built in IP’, and that’s completely understandable, it’s just a CYA thing. But with the shift started by WB last year; big bets on original IP (and were incredibly subversive), continued this year by Lionsgate and MGM with non-sequel and (more traditional) book IP with The Housemaid, Project Hail Mary and Michael; hopefully by adding in these runaway indie hits, we now have the marketplace examples that will make the path for non-sequel, non-TV and non-remake IP a little easier to get through the studio approval gauntlet. But as I said last week, the counterculture films of the late 60’s and early 70’s shook up the system enough that we ended up with a golden era of movies in the years after. It’s not like the Studio Heads were out of touch in the late 60’s, they saw what was going on in the marketplace and adjusted. The same will happen with today’s Studio Heads; the system that they’re trying to navigate isn’t friendly to independent thinking, and by having some outliers succeed, it should give them some wiggle room to push boundaries that don’t seem as crazy now. With Theatrical having its swagger back now, it’s entirely possible some great films are about to get made.

Anyway, I was going to give you a picture of the box-office but since only 65% of the expected votes grosses are in for the day, I’ll hold back on declaring any winner (even though it will probably end up this way).

Scary Movie 6 - I’m guessing that a lot of you forgot that there were 5 of these before this. The gross history of this IP is all over the map, with the Original, #3 and #4 all getting to the 40’s, #2 dropped to $20 million in 3 (although that was a Wednesday opening, and had their best day on a unusually rainy 4th of July Wednesday, so had 2 opened on a Friday it probably would have been in line with 1, 3 and 4) and #5 managed only $14.5 million back in 2013. But this has been a pretty strong IP historically and the current crew at Paramount has continued their ability to polish up these creaky and wheezing Dimension/Weinstein IPs (like Scream) into pretty strong openings, especially considering the films aren’t very good. What’s really interesting about this film is how it’s playing. You would think with the Wayans Brothers way out front, the top tier AA theaters would be right in the mix at the top the grosses, but they’re buried deep into the list. It’s Hispanic theaters that are embracing this and Los Angeles is especially good. The critics were pretty rough on this, and the exits so far are okay, but since the folks who went last night are the hard core fans and they’re just okay with it, that’s not good. It’s running about 3/4 of Scream 7 now, but that film opened at the end of February and we’re in Summer playtime now so the Matinees are better this time of year. The audience for this looks a little older and male than Scream, so this probably won’t play as deep into the night; but on the flip side of the argument, the hispanic skew might keep it going past 8pm. Just because it’s a little flat so far today, figure a gross somewhere in the mid 40’s, but if it fights through the quality and demo issues it could have a 5 in front of it.

He Man and the Masters of the Universe - This is a film that’s been interesting to watch over the last couple of months. It’s an IP that (I guess) has a following, apparently MGM made a decent movie and had a really good campaign for it (and as usual for MGM, leaned completely into), but you need this all to make sense to a general moviegoer and the tagalongs. In the long list of reasons why ‘this business is hard’, one of the main challenges here was finding a newcomer who has the ‘it’ factor to carry a movie of this size. What’s interesting to me is when I read some of the reveiws, the actor who they chose (Nicholas Galitzine) is apparently pretty good in the movie, but it’s weird how elements of a movie that work really well in the movie don’t compress easily into Marketing materials. There are a lot of you who get this who have run into this issue, and whatever promise he shows in the movie feels like a whiter shade of pale** in the Marketing materials. So when you are trying to break an unknown actor as a movie star and you really need that discovery factor to shine, sometimes it just feels flat in the sell, and that’s what it felt like here. In this case, you’ve got a film with a core fan base of older males (who were most of the audience yesterday), and in theory this should have some kid appeal; but since 2/3 of the kids are already out of school today, we should be seeing that and there’s nothing substantial there. This looks a little ahead of another older male skewing TV IP (and another movie no one asked for), The Fall Guy, but that film opened at the beginning of May with everyone still in school and went up 40% on Saturday, and I’m not sure (with all the kids out today) this can match that. This should be good enough to eek its way to $30 million for the weekend though.

Backrooms - Sir, I know Obsession, I’ve seen Obsession, and you’re no Obsession. The soft exits from last week are really showing up today and this looks like it’s going to be down about 65% to 70% this weekend. It’s about the same gross as Obsession right now, but a little better, and which film finishes #3 or #4 could boil down to the fact that this has 600 more runs. But this was such a monster last week it’s still looking like a 2nd weekend gross that (until last week) would be A24’s biggest opening, but figure high 20’s.

Obsession - Jesusfuckingchrist, there is no end to this film, it’s doing it again today and it looks almost even with last week. Who knew combining a fresh take on Fatal Attraction with the age old problem of not phrasing something the right way, would end up getting over $200 million and it sure looks like it has a path there. Looks down only a couple of points for another weekend in the mid 20’s.

Power Ballad - Since I was throwing a ton of ideas at you last week (and I ran out of time), I forgot to talk about the 10 run release they had last week. It was pretty good last week, but today they expanded to 1200 runs and it’s not very good. What’s a little weird here is that for a film that went with a two tier release, the exits this weekend aren’t great, in fact they are a half step behind Scary Movie. So having a successful platform release followed by a soft expansion tracks because the movie just plays okay, and this looks like a weekend of about $1.2 million or so.

• As someone who gets sent a lot of scripts to read that are looking to get made (and I’m not quite sure why), I have a profound appreciation for anyone who has to do this for a living. Everything is pretty mediocre and even the occasional good story is unmake-able. In the a sector that’s really hard, this particular aspect is really hard.

** since it’s an older male IP I’ll just go towards the older male music references.