Weekend numbers, breakevens and what a result actually means for the people who greenlit it.
Strip the reissues out of both ledgers and Endgame has led since 2019; Avatar's lead is $134m of re-release money from a China run and a 4K remaster.
Nell Fairweather4 min1K reads
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.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 took $77m domestically and $233.6m worldwide on its opening weekend. The exit polling is the part worth reading.