I Love Boosters: Keke Palmer's Wild New Movie Opens May 22

By Noah Bennett · May 19, 2026

I Love Boosters opens in theaters on May 22, 2026. The film stars Keke Palmer as the leader of a crew of shoplifters and is directed by Boots Riley — the mind behind Sorry to Bother You. It opens the same weekend as The Mandalorian and Grogu and has early buzz as a genuine comedy breakout. If you've been sleeping on Keke Palmer, this is the moment to wake up.

Why I Love Boosters Has Everyone Talking

There are movies you see coming from a mile away, and then there are movies that appear out of nowhere and knock you sideways. I Love Boosters feels like the second kind. The trailers dropped without much fanfare — no massive marketing blitz, no months of teaser hype — and yet within 48 hours of the first clip hitting the internet, the conversation was completely off the rails in the best possible way.

What got people was Keke Palmer. She's not doing anything restrained here. She is fully, chaotically, hilariously in command of every frame she's in, leading a crew of shoplifters through what looks like a comedy that has no interest in being polite about anything. This is a film with a point of view, and it isn't hiding it.

The fact that Boots Riley is directing makes the whole thing feel even more charged. His 2018 debut Sorry to Bother You was one of the strangest, sharpest, most genuinely original films of the last decade. It was a comedy that turned itself inside out by the third act and left audiences either delighted or deeply unsettled. I Love Boosters looks like it's operating in a similar spirit — using genre as a cover for something with real things to say about money, theft, and who gets to decide what counts as either.

Keke Palmer Is Having a Moment — and Then Some

I've been a Keke Palmer fan since her Akeelah and the Bee days, and watching her career over the past few years has been genuinely thrilling. The woman is everywhere — and for good reason. Her performance in Jordan Peele's Nope in 2022 was the electric jolt that film needed. She played against type, she was unpredictable, and she was magnetic in a way that made you forget everyone else was on screen.

Then came her hosting work: Emmy wins, viral moments, a social media presence that feels more like a full entertainment operation than a personal account. She has somehow turned being genuinely herself into a strategic superpower. Every red carpet appearance becomes a moment. Every talk show visit is a clip that gets reposted three thousand times. She's not manufactured. That's the thing. She's just like this.

I Love Boosters is the movie that could cement everything. This is her first major theatrical lead in an adult comedy, and from everything I've seen, she is running with it at full speed. The ensemble around her is reportedly star-studded, which suggests the film attracted serious talent who wanted to be in a Boots Riley movie with Keke Palmer at the center. That's a good sign about what people who've read the script think of it.

Boots Riley's Second Act

Eight years between features is a long time. Boots Riley has been working — producing, writing, developing projects — but the follow-up to Sorry to Bother You has been one of cinema's most anticipated second acts. That film divided people. Some called it a masterpiece. Some called it a mess. Almost nobody called it boring, which tells you everything you need to know about the filmmaker's instincts.

The wait for I Love Boosters makes a certain kind of sense when you know how he works. Riley isn't someone who makes films because he has a production deal to fill. He makes films because he has something specific he wants to say, and he needs exactly the right form to say it in. A shoplifting comedy featuring Keke Palmer sounds — on paper — like a fairly conventional premise. Based on the footage circulating, it is not a conventional film.

What Riley does best is set up a world that feels familiar and then detonate it about halfway through. Sorry to Bother You looked like a workplace comedy about telemarketing before it revealed itself to be something considerably weirder and more pointed. I Love Boosters has every appearance of pulling the same trick in a different register. The question isn't whether there's more going on beneath the surface. The question is how far down it goes.

Opening Weekend Against The Mandalorian

Opening the same weekend as The Mandalorian and Grogu is either the bravest scheduling decision of 2026 or evidence that the studio has enormous confidence in the film. The Mandalorian movie is one of the year's most anticipated releases, with a built-in global audience and a marketing budget that dwarfs most countries' GDP. Going head-to-head against that is not a small bet.

But I Love Boosters isn't targeting the same audience. The Mandalorian is an event film for the whole family, packed with nostalgia and franchise continuity. I Love Boosters is a sharp, adult comedy with a specific sensibility. These aren't competing films — they're competing for different seats in the same multiplex. A family going to see Grogu on Friday night might be the same people sending their college-age kids to see Keke Palmer on Saturday afternoon.

If I Love Boosters lands a $20-30 million opening weekend, that's a genuine win for an original comedy with no franchise backing. Word of mouth will be what carries it. And given the energy around Keke Palmer right now, the word of mouth could be extraordinary.