Star Wars Tops the Box Office. It Also Just Set the Franchise's Worst Disney-Era Opening.

The first theatrical Star Wars film in seven years opened at the top of the U.S. box office over Memorial Day weekend — and at the bottom of the franchise’s modern record book.

“The Mandalorian and Grogu,” directed by Jon Favreau and starring Pedro Pascal, collected an estimated $82 million from 4,300 North American theaters over the three-day weekend and is on track for roughly $102 million through Monday’s Memorial Day holiday, according to studio estimates reported by Variety, Deadline, UPI and the Associated Press wire. International grosses added about $63 million for a projected global opening of $165 million.

That number is enough to top the Memorial Day chart and, in isolation, would count as a respectable holiday launch for almost any other franchise. For Star Wars, it is the lowest opening of the Disney era — the period that began when the company bought Lucasfilm in 2012 — slipping below 2018’s “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” which opened to $84.4 million over three days and $103 million over the four-day Memorial Day frame. CNBC was first to flag the milestone, calling it Disney’s “lowest-ever Star Wars film opening.”

A franchise floor, but a profitable one

The unusual element of this opening is that the franchise low and a likely profit arrive in the same weekend.

According to multiple trade reports, “The Mandalorian and Grogu” was produced for a reported $165 million before marketing — Lucasfilm’s cheapest Star Wars project under Disney by a wide margin. Filmed in California using the StageCraft “Volume” virtual-production technology that powered the Disney+ series, the production also earned roughly $21.75 million in California film tax credits, lowering the studio’s net spend further. If those numbers hold, the film will have effectively covered its production cost in a single holiday weekend — a math Solo never managed, despite a budget reportedly twice as high.

Audience reception is also pointed in the right direction. CinemaScore polling produced an “A-” overall grade, with boys under 13 awarding a flat “A” and a five-out-of-five PostTrak score. Disney’s exit data, cited in trade reports, showed a 63 percent male audience, with the 25-to-34 bracket the single largest at about 23 percent of ticket buyers — the demographic that grew up with the prequel trilogy and Disney+‘s Mandalorian series. Critical reception, by contrast, has been mixed: the film carries a 63 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.

The combination — strong audience marks, mediocre reviews, modest opening, contained budget — is closer to a streaming-graduation success than a four-quadrant theatrical event. Which is essentially what the project is: a feature continuation of a series whose biggest cultural moments, including the introduction of Grogu in 2019, played out on Disney+ rather than on screens.

Star Wars at the box office — and at the streaming margin

The benchmark that “The Mandalorian and Grogu” most clearly trails is the one Disney would rather not be measuring against. “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” the previous theatrical entry in late 2019, opened to $177 million domestically and finished above $1 billion worldwide. Earlier sequel-trilogy films opened above $200 million domestically. Even Solo, the franchise’s previous bottom mark, had the excuse of releasing two weeks after “Avengers: Infinity War” had vacuumed up the spring’s blockbuster attention.

“The Mandalorian and Grogu” had no such excuse. It opened cleanly into Memorial Day weekend with no major-studio competition until “Toy Story 5” arrives in June, and it still landed near a number Solo posted under far worse conditions. Adjusted for inflation, Solo’s $84 million 2018 opening is closer to $112 million in 2026 dollars, a comparison several outlets — including ScreenRant and CNBC — have used to argue that the real-dollar gap between the two films is wider than the headline numbers suggest.

What the weekend confirms is a question Lucasfilm has been navigating since 2019: whether the streaming-first turn — six Disney+ Star Wars series since 2019, including Andor, Ahsoka and The Acolyte — has cannibalized the theatrical audience or expanded it. The opening number suggests the answer is more complicated than either pole. The audience that exists for Star Wars is loyal, willing to show up on a holiday weekend, and large enough to clear a contained budget. It is no longer reliably large enough to deliver a $1 billion blockbuster.

Disney’s next theatrical Star Wars film, “Starfighter,” directed by Shawn Levy and starring Ryan Gosling, is currently scheduled for May 2027 with a reported budget roughly double “Mandalorian and Grogu’s.” The Memorial Day result will be one of several data points used to calibrate whether that budget is the right number.

Obsession breaks the rules underneath

The more genuinely unusual story of the weekend sat one slot below Star Wars on the chart.

“Obsession,” a Blumhouse horror film distributed by Focus Features and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Curry Barker, earned an estimated $22 million over the three-day weekend in its second frame, with the Memorial Day projection at about $28 million for four days. That is a roughly 30 percent jump over its $17.2 million opening the prior weekend — the strongest second-weekend gain for a wide-release horror film in domestic box office history, surpassing the 19 percent climb that “Heart Eyes” managed over Valentine’s weekend in 2025.

Horror films are typically front-loaded; second-weekend drops of 60 percent or more are standard. A second-weekend increase of 30 percent — across roughly 2,500 theaters — is essentially unheard of. The film, made on a reported $750,000 production budget, has now grossed more than $58 million domestically and about $74 million worldwide. It carries a 95 percent Rotten Tomatoes critics score, which is the rare horror film positioned for both word-of-mouth and review-driven growth.

Industry analysts cited across trade coverage have pointed to two factors: a younger audience that turned out heavily after social-media response built through the week, and the fact that Memorial Day weekend left horror with no genre competition while Star Wars vacuumed up the family audience. Obsession’s holdover behavior is the kind of trajectory that, if it continues, can carry a micro-budget Blumhouse title past the $100 million domestic line — a return-on-investment ratio that no Star Wars film can mathematically match.

What it means for the summer

Memorial Day weekend is the traditional starting flag for the U.S. summer box office. This year’s flag drops on an industry already on a stronger footing than at any point since the pandemic.

According to Comscore data cited by CNBC, the 2026 calendar-year domestic box office had reached $3.02 billion through mid-May, a 16 percent gain over the same point in 2025. Forecasting firm Cinelytic has projected a summer total of around $4.5 billion across May through August — a roughly 24 percent jump over last summer, which would mark the strongest summer since 2016. The path to that number runs through Pixar’s “Toy Story 5” in June, Disney’s live-action “Moana,” Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” from Universal, and Sony’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” in July, then through August comedies and counter-programming.

The summer began two weeks ago with 20th Century Studios’ “The Devil Wears Prada 2” opening to $77 million, outgrossing the 2006 original’s entire domestic run in 10 days. Lionsgate’s “Michael” — covered separately in our analysis of the highest-grossing music biopic in North American history — has continued to draw audiences in its fifth weekend. With “Mandalorian and Grogu” delivering a competent if unspectacular tentpole opening, the early summer slate has hit every release on its mark without producing a true four-quadrant phenomenon.

That pattern — many films working, no single film towering — is consistent with what Hollywood has been quietly hoping the post-strike, post-pandemic theatrical business looks like. It is not the era of the $1 billion sure-thing tentpole. It is something closer to a portfolio: a profitable Star Wars at $165 million instead of $300 million, a horror sleeper turning $750,000 into $74 million, a 20-year-old sequel beating its original, a biopic with legs. The Memorial Day chart is, in that sense, an accurate picture of where the business is — and a useful counter to the narrative emerging from this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Hollywood studios were largely absent from the competition.

What it is not is a triumphant return to form for Star Wars. The audience that showed up Friday through Monday was the audience that had been showing up for the Disney+ shows. Whether a wider audience exists — the kind that produced $2 billion global runs for the sequel trilogy — remains a question the franchise has not yet answered. “Starfighter” next May will be the next test. Until then, the broader summer movie slate that follows will have to do the work of proving that the post-pandemic theatrical business can be reliably big without being reliably massive.