Disclosure Day Ends Spielbergs Summer Box Office Drought

Steven Spielberg is many things.Hollywood icon.

Nostalgia dealer.Dinosaur daddy.But is he cool?The 79-year-old filmmaker returned to the summer box office for the first time in a decade over the weekend with “Disclosure Day,” an original science-fiction spectacle.

It collected an estimated $44 million at 3,824 theaters in the United States and Canada from Thursday through Sunday, according to Rentrak, an entertainment data service.“A very good opening,” said David A.Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers, noting that original stories are inherently harder to market than established franchises.

A week ago, “Disclosure Day” was on track to take in roughly $35 million in its first weekend, with analysts basing that estimate on advance ticket sales and surveys that track moviegoer interest.The primary reason for the uncertainty was that no one, not even Universal Pictures, the studio behind “Disclosure Day,” was quite sure whether the film would attract younger moviegoers.They’re the ones who typically rush out to see new movies and who have recently powered extra big opening weekends for films like “Backrooms.”And if teenagers and young adults didn’t show up, could “Disclosure Day” rely on older moviegoers to pick up the slack? Ticket buyers over 34 — “old” by Hollywood’s reckoning — have been the slowest to return to theaters since the pandemic.In the end, the oldsters saved the day.

About 59 percent of the “Disclosure Day” audience was over 34, according to PostTrak, a movie research firm.Compare that with “Backrooms,” a cooler-than-thou horror movie (from a 20-year-old first-time director who built a following on YouTube) that managed to sell an eye-popping $81.4 million in tickets on its opening weekend last month.Roughly 14 percent of ticket buyers for “Backrooms” over its first three days in theaters were over 34.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please en...