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The summer domestic box office is so close — so close–to hitting an all-time record, surpassing the $4.756 billion set in 2013.
Currently, per Rentrak, the North American box office for the first Friday in May through EOD Sunday stands at $4.598 billion, officially the second-highest summer ever. If this summer is going to beat 2013’s all-time high, it has $158M to gross. If this week and next Labor Day weekend overperform, no sweat, but the estimation by some sources is that we could come up $18M-$22M short of 2013’s all-time high.
This weekend saw $100M in business from all titles in U.S. and Canada according to Rentrak, 46% over the same frame a year ago. Sony/Marvel Studios’ Spider-Man: Brand New Day came in higher in its fifth No. 1 with $22.2M, while indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment posted its biggest opening ever with $15.4M in its release of Warner Bros Animation’s abandoned Looney Tunes movie, Coyote vs. Acme. That’s right where presales and tracking predicted it. The only new major-studio wide entry movie next weekend is Paramount’s Mark Wahlberg crime drama, By Any Means. Look for Spider-Man to do around $18M-$20M over the four-day holiday.
Paul Dergarabedian, Rentrak’s Head of Marketplace Trends, calls all this nail-biting with summer a “Hollywood cliffhanger.”
At some point in the next couple of days or sooner, Spider-Man: Brand New Day will become the second movie ever to cross $900M at the domestic box office after 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens — which is the highest-grossing pic of all time in North America with $936.66M. The Destin Daniel Cretton-directed Spidey sequel reps around 20% of the summer’s entire business. If you add in Universal’s The Odyssey, which is Christopher Nolan’s highest-grossing ever at $563.8M, then Spidey and Odysseus account for close to 32% of all ticket sales between the first Friday of May and Sunday, August 30.
“No matter where the final number lands, we have to keep the calendar in mind,” Dergarabedian said. “There are still eight days of box office to be added from Monday, August 31, through Labor Day Monday, September 7, giving this year a full 130-day summer movie season. For a true apples-to-apples comparison, the first 123 days of summer 2026 should be compared with the 123-day summer of 2013. Based on the current forecast, summer 2026 should stand at approximately $4.612 billion through Monday, August 31, making it the second-highest-grossing 123-day summer movie season of all time.”
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He added: “I don’t think it really matters at this point whether we beat the record. This has been such a spectacular moviegoing season that the numbers are just that and the incredible mix of films presented to audiences this year has been a game changer, not only for the industry, but for younger moviegoers.
“This could be their version of what Jaws was to audiences in 1975, Star Wars in 1977 and Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. in the early ’80s,” he adds, “Think about what those movies meant to audiences and how they changed the way the industry looked at the summer movie season.”
Disney’s Toy Story 5 is third this summer with $478. 8M domestic, followed by Focus Features’ Obsession (263.5M), Lionsgate’s Michael ($242M), Disney’s The Devil Wears Prada 2 ($220M).