LOS ANGELES — The summer box office got its first genuine crowd-pleaser of the season on Friday, and it arrived not from a superhero franchise or a legacy IP sequel but from Marlon Wayans doing what he has always done best. “Scary Movie 6” hauled in $24.7 million domestically on its opening day from 3,490 theaters, putting it on course for a $56 million debut weekend that would make it the highest-grossing opening in the franchise’s 26-year history.
The record it would displace belongs to “Scary Movie 4,” which opened to $49.7 million in April 2006. To surpass it on a budget of just $30 million — a figure that barely covers the craft services bill on some studio tentpoles — is the kind of arithmetic that makes Hollywood pay attention.
Paramount Pictures and Miramax co-produced the film, reuniting Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans and Damon Wayans Jr. on screen for the first time since the franchise’s early years. Keenen Ivory Wayans, who directed the original in 2000, co-wrote the script alongside Craig Waynes and Rick Alvarez. Anna Faris and Regina Hall return as Cindy Campbell and Brenda Meeks, respectively, completing a cast that also includes Kenan Thompson, Carmen Electra, Cheri Oteri and Heidi Gardner. Michael Tiddes directs.
The targets are plentiful: the film reportedly sends up “Scream,” “Get Out,” “Long Legs,” “Sinners,” “M3GAN” and “Weapons,” among others. That list of source material tells a story of its own. The horror genre has produced an unusually rich run of prestige-adjacent films over the past five years, and the parody genre has historically fed on exactly that kind of cultural saturation. The question, heading into the weekend, was whether audiences still had an appetite for broad, slapstick horror-comedy at a moment when the genre being parodied has itself become more self-aware. Friday’s number suggests they do.
The same could not be said for “Masters of the Universe.” Amazon MGM’s $200 million adaptation of the iconic 1980s action figure and cartoon franchise claimed second place on Friday with $11.7 million from 3,677 screens, pointing toward a $30 million opening weekend. For a film of that budget, that is a difficult result — the kind that triggers long conversations in studio boardrooms about the gap between nostalgia and audience intent.
Travis Knight, who directed “Bumblebee” — the Transformers spinoff that quietly outperformed nearly every other entry in that franchise by dialing back the spectacle and focusing on character — helms “Masters of the Universe.” The film follows Prince Adam as he travels from Earth to his home planet of Eternia to confront the undead sorcerer Skeletor. Nicholas Galitzine, who has been building a quiet run of well-reviewed performances in recent years, stars as the blond-haired warrior. Idris Elba plays Man-at-Arms; Camila Mendes is Teela; Alison Brie is Evil-Lyn; Jared Leto takes on Skeletor.
The cast is credible, the director’s track record is real, and the IP is genuinely beloved by a generation of fans who grew up with the cartoon. None of that is translating to ticket sales at the level the budget demands. The film’s underperformance is the kind that does not necessarily mean audiences rejected it — reviews and word-of-mouth will play out over the coming days — but it does mean that the film faces an uphill path to profitability that will require strong international numbers and a durable second-week hold.
Meanwhile, A24’s “Backrooms,” the liminal-horror debut from 20-year-old Kane Parsons, continued to prove that the summer’s most interesting financial story belongs to the smallest film in the top five. In its second Friday, the film took $7.9 million, pointing toward a $25 million weekend. That represents a steep 69% drop from its record-breaking $81.5 million debut — but on a production budget of approximately $10 million, the film has already crossed into the most profitable tier of 2026 releases by any reasonable measure.
The drop itself is worth holding against the context. A 69% second-weekend decline for a horror film with no established franchise identity and a first-time feature director is not a sign of collapse. It is the normal behavior of a film that front-loaded heavily on the strength of curiosity, viral buildup and the novelty of Parsons’ backstory. The real measure of “Backrooms” as a business will come in weeks three and four, when the drop should stabilize and the cumulative gross continues to compound.
Focus Features’ “Obsession” placed fourth with $7.4 million domestically on its fourth Friday in release, pointing toward a $24 million weekend total that would push its North American cumulative to roughly $151 million. The film opened to $17 million against a budget of under $1 million — one of those genuine studio surprises that the industry periodically needs to be reminded are still possible. Its 9% week-over-week decline is extraordinarily flat for a horror film and suggests that the film has found a sustained audience well beyond its opening-weekend base.
Fifth place belonged to “The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act,” a feature-length adaptation of a popular web series that played in 2,221 theaters beginning Wednesday. The film — directed, written and composed by Cooper Goodwin, known online as Gooseworx — collected an estimated $4.6 million on Friday and is tracking toward a $14.1 million run through Sunday. The surreal animated dark comedy follows a group of humans imprisoned in a cartoon virtual reality. Its arrival in multiplexes is one of the stranger events of the summer season, a reminder that the pipeline feeding theatrical audiences now includes avenues that did not exist five years ago.
What this weekend’s results clarify, if nothing else, is that the summer of 2026 does not belong to any single franchise logic. The film with the lowest budget in the top three is also the most profitable. The film with the highest budget is the one facing the hardest questions. And the parody — a genre that has been declared dead several times since the early 2000s — is outperforming a $200 million IP adaptation on a fraction of the spend. Whether “Masters of the Universe” can reverse the narrative with a strong international opening, and whether “Scary Movie 6” can hold past its opening weekend, will define the next chapter of what has already become a surprisingly unpredictable season.
