Weekend numbers, breakevens and what a result actually means for the people who greenlit it.
Thursday's preview arithmetic said $27m to $30m while NRG's polling said $43m, and the weekend's real surprise was an Elizabeth Holmes documentary taking $15m from 855 cinemas.
Nell Fairweather4 min
Street Fighter took $4m in Thursday previews. 2026's other two video game films opened at 6.8 and 7.4 times their preview number, which brackets this weekend at $27m to $30m, under every tracking figure, against an $82m budget.
Superman opened to 55.6 cents for every dollar of its $225m budget. On a reported $40m, Clayface hits the same mark at $22.2m, below the bottom of its tracking range.
The Odyssey averaged $3,571 a cinema in its 13th weekend against $964 for Digger's second. Three days back in IMAX took $2m; the seven days without it took $1.81m.
Resident Evil reached $320.2m worldwide and took the franchise record from The Final Chapter. Strip China out of both and the new film is 83% ahead; on the usual studio splits, the record is worth about 31% more.
Verity dropped 64% in its second weekend and Amazon MGM pointed at Hurricane Isaias. Day by day, the stormy Saturday held best, four rival films improved their holds, and the landfall zone is worth about 1.3 points.
Other Mommy topped the box office with $27.5m and the lowest CinemaScore since Megalopolis. We ran the multiples for six badly graded horror films: the median gives it $63m, the worst case $43m, on a budget of $19m.
The Social Reckoning took $650,000 in Thursday previews and is projected at $6m, about 27% of The Social Network's 2010 opening. Other Mommy outsold it five and a half times over on a $19m budget.
Drishyam 2 took 56 days to gross ₹342.31 crore worldwide. Drishyam 3: The Conclusion reached ₹341.90 crore by Tuesday, its fifth day, passing the Malayalam original's entire run on the way.
Avatar's $2,923,710,708 contains $180,133,121 its original release did not earn. Avengers Endgame: Encore has taken $86,106,643 back in three days, and needs $38,164,965 more.
La Bola Negra sold 613,240 tickets in Spain for €4,673,201, an average of €7.62 a head against a market average of €7.75. Avengers: Endgame Encore, second in the same chart, averaged €8.60.
Forgotten Island's $12.8m opening is being written up as a DreamWorks disaster. Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado opened Puss in Boots: The Last Wish at $12,429,515 and finished on $186,090,535. The difference between the two films is not the reviews. It is the calendar.
A24's Primetime opened to $8,494,586 on Friday, against $7.7m for Mickey 17's first day in March 2025. One cost a reported $15m, the other $118m. Per screen, the cheap one is winning by 46%.
Endgame Encore took $11.2m on Friday against the original's $157.5m opening day, and is heading for $26m. Avatar's entire ten-day 2022 re-release made $24.7m.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu's six theatrically reported features have grossed $878.6m worldwide between them. Digger, which premiered in London on Tuesday as this year's Royal Film Performance, needs around $310m on its own just to get level.
Resident Evil took $24m on Friday including previews and is heading for about $50m. That is 48% of the weekend on day one, against 41.8% for Weapons, which is why forecasts of $58m to $68m, ours included, were too high.
Resident Evil's $8m-$9m in previews is more than Welcome to Raccoon City took in its entire opening weekend. Applying the preview multiples of Weapons and Mortal Kombat II gives a $59m-$68m opening; the tracking says $40m-$50m. Here is the arithmetic, and why it may still be wrong.
Obsession was made for $750,000 and has taken $513.8m worldwide. It sits seventh on the 2026 domestic chart, ahead of every Disney release this year except Toy Story 5, and its opening weekend alone returned 23 times its budget.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day has passed The Force Awakens' $936,662,225 to become the biggest domestic release ever. Divide each gross by the price of a ticket in its year and the new record holder sold about 70 million seats against 111 million. It also took a bigger share of its year's cinemagoing than Star Wars did.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day stands at $935,170,888 in North America, $1,491,337 behind The Force Awakens. It lost the top spot this weekend and will take the all-time domestic record anyway, probably by Wednesday.
The Odyssey has taken $593.1m in North America and $1.65bn worldwide. One of those records is real and one is an artefact of pricing, and the difference is $296 million.
Susanne Bier's sequel reunites Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman 28 years on. The reviews are poor, the previews were not, and the studio is about to find out which one the audience believes.
Spider-Man won at home over Labor Day. The Odyssey won the world. Now it needs about $43 million more to pass Jurassic World as Universal's highest grosser.
Summer 2026 set a US record of $4.76 billion and the year is within reach of $10 billion. The clearest explanation is not a change in appetite, it is a change in release count.