Steven Spielberg just opened a movie to $44 million domestic. For an original film, not a sequel or an adaptation of something with a built in audience, that is his best opening ever. Disclosure Day is performing exactly the way a Spielberg event picture should, and the fact that it is an original story makes the number even more impressive. Studios have spent years telling us original films cannot open anymore. Spielberg apparently did not get that memo.
But the real story this weekend is actually at number two. Obsession, the $750,000 horror film that nobody saw coming, is projected to earn $21 million in its fifth weekend. Let that sink in for a second. This movie has now posted four consecutive weekends bigger than its $17.2 million opening. That almost never happens. Films decline. That is just the natural lifecycle of a theatrical release. Obsession is doing the opposite, growing week after week through pure word of mouth.
It has become the highest grossing film in Focus Features history, which is a stat that covers everything from Lost in Translation to Brokeback Mountain to Downton Abbey. A three quarter million dollar horror movie just outgrossed all of them. The economics of this thing are genuinely absurd.
I think what is happening with Obsession is something the industry forgot was possible. People are telling their friends to go see it. Not posting about it, not adding it to a watchlist, actually telling the person sitting next to them at dinner that they need to get to a theater. That kind of grassroots momentum is how Jaws worked, how The Blair Witch Project worked, how Paranormal Activity worked. It requires a movie that gets under your skin and stays there.
If you still have not seen Obsession, I want you to know that your friends are genuinely tired of telling you to go watch it. They have been having conversations about it without you for a month now. The movie is not going anywhere, clearly, but at some point you are just going to have to go.
Meanwhile Spielberg opens to $44 million and somehow that feels like the secondary headline. What a weird, wonderful weekend at the box office.
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