Scott Mendelson's Needlessly Long Weekend Box Office Analysis For 05/31/26

'Backrooms' opened with a sky-high $81 million as 'Star Wars' tumbled 69% and 'Obsession' became the first non-Christmas flick since 'E.T.' to go up in both its second and third weekends.

At long last, the disruptors have been disrupted.

The notion of younger, emerging talent being given the chance to make reasonably budgeted studio features, ones that are either original or based on new(er) IP that is popular with younger moviegoers, shouldn’t be revolutionary. Nor is the notion that nationwide theatrical release is a vessel for creating a monoculture pop culture event or for affirming a given source material, IP or the respective artist’s existing popularity.

That some of these new filmmakers are self-trained with copious YouTube-specific resumes is merely the latest incarnation of the next batch being trained via film school in the 1970s, MTV music videos in the 1980s, cutting-edge commercials in the 1990s, and so forth. After over a decade of being constantly told that theatrical exhibition is a relic of a pre-streaming era and that those darn kids won’t get off their smartphones and show up to cinemas, well, even the very generation raised amid constant interconnectivity still views the notion of being a theatrical filmmaker as the aspirational end-goal.

And even the so-called smartphone/screentime generation has become, when Hollywood bothers to release films that aren’t just rehashes of their parents’ or grandparents’ favorite IP, excessively willing to show up in theaters, partially because it gives them an excuse to leave the house, participate in in-person socialization and look away from their screens for 2-3 hours. I’m less inclined to think of this weekend as a blow to the system than an affirmation that, when not kneecapped or undercut by external factors or Wall Street-driven self-sabotage, the allegedly out-of-date system still works as intended.