NBA YoungBoy’s sold-out arena tour last year solidified the rapper’s place as a leader of his generation. Clips of packed-out venues filled with screaming young fans spread like wildfire on social media, as YoungBoy defied the ongoing gloom around hip-hop touring by grossing more than $69 million across 42 arena shows. Fittingly, the Baton Rouge-born rapper just dropped a tour documentary, American YoungBoy, allowing fans to relive the excitement.
Even with the weekend’s crowded field — including the box-office juggernaut Michael — YoungBoy’s film landed at Number 10 on the domestic weekend chart, while only playing in 583 theaters. Directed by Nico Ballesteros, who notably helmed the Ye documentary In Whose Name, YoungBoy’s film is packed with concert footage, behind-the-scenes production moments, and glimpses of the rapper’s home and family life between shows. NBA YoungBoy is also listed among the documentary’s producers alongside Patrick Hughes, Antoine Banks, and Kyle Claiborne.
Fans turned several movie theaters around the country into impromptu concerts, singing and dancing along to the performances on the screen. In a perfect metaphor for the film’s impact, a TikTok user shared footage of their theater for Michael, and you can clearly hear the YoungBoy fans in the next room. The energy around his documentary is even more evidence of how impossible it is to contain YoungBoy’s fandom. The rapper has a singular hold over his vast, mostly young audience in a way many mainstream acts today don’t — so much so that his fandom easily bursts through any means of confinement, be it an arena or a movie theater. American YoungBoy may be packaged as a tour documentary, but the response has made it feel more like a continuation of the MASA Tour itself.
At a time when theaters are struggling to lure people away from their couches, American YoungBoy made a case for the movies as a reason to leave the house. Its modest $1.2 million opening weekend wasn’t necessarily a blockbuster, but it did show that YoungBoy’s fans weren’t only interested in watching the MASA Tour at home on a screen, but in recreating the feeling of being at the shows with one another. For an artist whose power has always been the intensity of his following, the box office numbers only tell half the story. You can hear the rest echoing through your local theater’s walls.
This article originally appeared on Rolling Stone.
