Back in August I had something to say of the bullishness of the entertainment press' crowing over the box office receipts as it looked forward to Hollywood's first "$10 billion year" (i.e. first $10 billion theatrical gross) since before the pandemic--apparently oblivious to how a near-decade of inflation have meant that these days $10 billion ain't what it was pre-pandemic, and is in fact not much better than the fairly lousy gross of 2023 when we adjust for it, what was disappointing then being passed off as "aspirational" and an achievement now through the magic of innumeracy. The crowing is if anything louder now, as the end-of-summer retrospectives show us--such that here I am offering my own reading, in which I appraise the summer of 2026 as really no better than what we saw the three preceding summers.
Let us start with the summer that the very "presentist" idiots of the professional commentariat are most likely to reach for as the first point of comparison--the immediately preceding summer of 2025, a disappointing summer season in a disappointing box office year. I fully admit that, even when we account for the first-of-May to Labor Day weekend period being a whole week longer in 2026 than in 2025 because of a relatively late Labor Day (September 7 rather than September 1) by limiting ourselves to the 123-day, first-to-eighteenth weekend between that May start of the season and the last weekend beginning in August, there is a significant gap in the gross between one season and the other. Specifically 2026 came away with a healthy extra near-billion dollars ($4.58 billion versus the prior year's $3.6 billion) between the first May weekend, and the last weekend beginning in August. The problem with making so much of this as the commentariat is doing is that this was a matter of the late summer season having a boost from two immense outliers of a kind one ordinarily can't count on in a single movie season, or single year, as a close reading of the figures shows. Between the first weekend of the summer at the start of May, and the week immediately preceding the third weekend of July, the 2025 and 2026 seasons were nearly tied--2026 merely matching the lousy equivalent stretch of 2025 in real terms, with $2.56 billion in the till, versus the prior year's $2.45 billion, the 4 percent advantage all but wiped out by the near 4 (3.5) percent inflation of the prior twelve month period. Admittedly when we look at the monthly figures we see that 2026 did have a better May, and a better June, than 2025 did, but, reflecting the way that films like the new Star Wars movie and Masters of the Universe movie disappointed badly, they were not so much better that the weak early-to-mid July period, in which the "underperformance" of Supergirl, the live-action remake of Moana and the latest Minions sufficed to even things out. It was only when The Odyssey came along in that third weekend of the month, and Spider-Man arrived in its last, that business picked up--with those two movies accounting for virtually all the increased business, accounting as the two of them did for three-quarters of the total box office receipts of the period.
Approaching the matter another way consider the top ten films of the two seasons. The top ten films of the summer of 2025 together grossed $2.49 billion; in 2026 $3.22 billion at the point in time discussed here; making for a rough $730 million gap. However, in 2025 the two top earners took in some $780 million, but in 2026 about $1.46 billion, a $680 million difference coming to over 93 percent of the gap. Remove them from the picture and the next eight films in line each collectively made about the same amount of money, with the advantage of the films of 2026 so slight (just $1.764 billion as against $1.717 billion) that, again, the gross in 2026 turns out to have actually run a little behind that of 2025 when we adjust for inflation. Once more, considering the matter this way shows that those top two films, The Odyssey and Spider-Man, made all the difference.
In the way that in 2026 two late July releases saved a flagging box office those who can think more than one year back will also remember 2023, when once more a weak summer season in which franchise film after franchise film underperformed two late July releases--a dark, adult, R-rated Christopher Nolan film that somehow made unlikely blockbuster material a popular hit (remember Oppenheimer?), and a lighter, brightly colored, PG-13 film that made even more money--came to the box office's rescue. One may see an echo of 2024 as well in the late July release of a Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero film that people really wanted to see coming to the rescue of that less than stellar summer season (Deadpool & Wolverine). And taking all four years together one, again, sees that however much the biggest hits may make as much money as ever they did, they also underline the fact that this is not a matter of any broad-based resurgence of film performance, or the moviegoing that would enable it, but of the kind of rare events that cannot be reliably manufactured and thus counted upon coming together in a rare close proximity and giving a sagging box office a lift.
Once again: due to changes in habits wrought by hard times from the "Great Recession" forward, the escalation of the small screen's competition with the big by streaming, and the lingering disruptions of a mass-killing, mass-disabling, still-ongoing pandemic that the media are exceedingly eager for everyone to forget (maybe that theater you used to go to isn't around anymore, and there isn't another anywhere near so convenient close by), people go to the movies less than they used to--per capita ticket sales in North America two a year rather than the three to four a year they had been before the pandemic. As this greater reticence about the proverbial night at the movies suggests, people are choosier filmgoers, passing on many a movie that just a few years ago they would have casually gone to see--with big-budget franchise films that depended on sucking in more casual viewers to hit their highs in particular suffering. The result is a smaller market with tighter competition, such that if you want the public to devote one of their (again, we are averaging) two trips to the theater this year to your film you had better make something that excites them in a Gotta See It Now way. This doesn't have to mean high art or great innovation (certainly It Ends With Us wasn't, certainly the video game-based hits of recent years haven't been), or even rule out more classically blockbuster-type franchise films of the superhero or any other type (Spider-Man, again, was a case of a franchise film that did excite them), but it does mean that Hollywood will do a lot better targeting its hits in line with the detectable existence of genuine public enthusiasm (and keeping a close watch on the bottom line as they do so) than cranking out high-cost franchise films nobody asked for in the expectation that "everyone" will show up and then WHINING WHEN THEY DON'T (as the difference between, for example, Brand New Day and the profoundly ill-conceived $200 million rendition of He-Man we just got shows).
Of course, that is not the narrative the Hollywood executives want promulgated, and which their courtiers in the entertainment press are promulgating, as instead they cling pathetically to the delusion that the market is "recovering" to what it had been before the pandemic, an euphemism for the studios being able to go back to assembly-line production of crapola the way Bob Iger's Disney exemplified in the days before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19, as they scrape the bottom of the barrel for any old thing they can remake, reboot, spin-off, sequel, prequel. Thus does it seem that we can now look forward to a ready-to-retire Tom Cruise in yet another retread of a movie from the days when he specialized in playing the arrogant young jackass, Days of Thunder, Part 2--my two cents on which notion you can of course read here.
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