While New York City waits for the Knicks to start play in the NBA Finals this Wednesday, a catamaran racing league sailed into New York Harbor for two days of competition. The WSJ Leadership Institute’s Megan Graham reports for the newsletter:

SailGP returned to New York this weekend as both the sail racing league and the U.S. team strive to spotlight their properties on a global stage.

The league has seen an influx of investors and fans who haven’t traditionally been part of the sailing world. And its cachet among celebs appears to be rising: Disney+ on Friday announced a docuseries about SailGP’s Australian team, whose co-owners include Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, while Anne Hathaway is part of a group that acquired the Italian team.

“A lot of our fastest-growing fan segments will have never owned a sailing boat and possibly never will. That’s kind of the point,” SailGP CMO Leah Davis told me ahead of the weekend. “We don’t just market SailGP to sailing fans. We want people who love the sport, the spectacle, the speed and the culture of what we’re creating.”

“We want to be seen as this bucket-list sporting experience” alongside events like the U.S. Open and Kentucky Derby, Davis added.

The league has used technology like augmented reality to help newbie viewers get comfortable with the sport, which Davis says is traditionally quite technical and difficult to understand.

“You’ve got to have multiple levels of entry for people to come in,” she said.

The board of the U.S. team includes Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn, VaynerMedia chief executive Gary Vaynerchuk, actress Issa Rae and musician DJ Khaled.

“A New York sports team is truly global,” team principal, CEO and co-owner Mike Buckley said in an interview last week. “You can go anywhere in the world and find somebody with a Yankees hat or a Rangers hat or a Knicks hat…. We want to be that same kind of beacon in our sport, but that's going to take a lot of really hard work.”

The U.S. team over the weekend built “fan zones” where passersby could buy merchandise by Tommy Hilfiger, meet team members and try racing simulators.

Out on the water, though, high winds caused the league to call for an adjusted format Saturday. On Sunday, the Bonds Flying Roos—Reynolds and Jackman’s team—won the event final.

“Backrooms,” the modestly budgeted horror movie with a deeply online origin story, opened with a shocking $81.5 million at the domestic box office over the weekend.

It’s the highest-ever debut for a horror film that isn’t a sequel or based on a book, not accounting for inflation, Ben Fritz and John Jurgensen report for The Wall Street Journal. 

The opening immediately makes the $10 million production with minimal marketing expenses one of the most profitable movies of the year, as Variety points out.

Also shocking: About 86% of ticket buyers were under 35.

Its success among famously fickle, often completely uninterested young moviegoers stems partly from the movie’s roots online, starting with an eerie photo on 4chan of a fluorescent-lit room and expanding through a series of popular YouTube videos by a teenager—now age 20, and the director of “Backrooms.”

Here’s Fritz and Jurgensen:

But don’t discount the impact of those billboards. One went up in Oshkosh, Wisc., where the original creepy photo was taken, generating attention among those in the know and explainers for everybody else.

And then there was a perhaps surprising boost on Friday by McDonald’s, which posted a two-minute video of its own “Backrooms” experience.

More: The movie business is about to get VidCon-ized. [THR]

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