Forget the woes of a potential Paramount-WBD merger, the summer domestic box office is on fire, just $14.8M away from crossing $4 billion. This is all according to Rentrak.
For for the period of May 1-Aug. 9, the summer B.O. stands at $3.985B. The last time the North American box office crossed $4B was 2023 with $4.095B. This year will rep the second time post Covid it’s shot past that threshold, and the 14th time in box office history to cross $4B. Summer 2013 holds the all-time record for the best the season has ever seen with $4.755B, that’s when Iron Man 3 led with $409M followed by Despicable Me 2 with $367.7M.
It takes a village: not only have the tentpoles like Sony/Marvel Studio’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 5 and Universal’s The Odyssey delivered with a combined $1.58 billion, but the new school of filmmakers as well, and we’re talking YouTube natives Curry Barker and Kane Parsons whose respective The Obsession and The Backrooms grossed a grand total of $460.7M stateside. Those five films account for $2B of North American ticket sales or 50% of summer.
Brand New Day and Odyssey will continue to carry the torch through August. The hope is that August has another tentpole in Bad Robot’s Anne Hathaway-Ewan McGregor dinosaur movie The End of Oak Street, which right now is looking like a $30M start when it opens on Aug. 14. This weekend, with Spidey and Odysseus leading the way, it wasn’t a marketplace where all boats rose with wide counterprogramming One Night Only, Super Troopers 3 and The Ice Cream Man underperforming with low single digit starts. That said, 2026 saw its third best weekend for all titles at the U.S./Canada box office with $205M (after last weekend’s all-time record $437.1M and Toy Story 5‘s opening frame of June 19-21 which drove $231.6M).