4th of July weekend 2026

There are a couple of weekends on the box-office Calendar that are moving targets, because they’re attached to a specific date, and the way that date lands on a day of the week can mean an updraft or a downdraft at the box-office. Christmas, for instance, is really good when Christmas is on a Thursday or Friday; but when it’s on a Sunday, you get a Christmas Eve Saturday and it can push down the whole holiday period. This is one of those years for 4th of July, and when it falls on Saturday, it’s usually not a great day at the box-office. Today (Friday, because it’s the National Holiday) is great and will probably be the best day of the weekend, but usually Saturday goes down by about a third and then Sunday comes up a little.

This is a tricky weekend to release a film, and because of the location of this weekend in relation to the rest of the Summer, it’s prime real estate; but there’s a downside as well. When the 4th is on a Saturday, you really can’t open on Friday because the 4th is an iffy box-office day and if you open on Friday the 3rd it’s an amateur move (cough, Angel Studios, cough). But all of you know my feelings about opening on a non-Friday, because it just dilutes your 3 day into 5 days and the optics of your 3 day Friday Saturday Sunday gross aren’t good, plus next weekend you’re decaying off a soft 3 day. Sometimes there’s just nowhere else to go and it’s the best course of action, but sometimes Studios choose a release date for a film because ‘we always go there’. That’s terrible logic because the release calendar changes from year to year, and just because you had success on a specific weekend doesn’t mean anything going forward, especially on a weekend like this that’s a moving target.

But because the 4th is smack dab in the middle of Summer, and it’s an outdoor activity day, the weather can cause an updraft effect on the box-office. Normally the weather isn’t a factor and it’s just a fair day at the box-office, but rain can be a very good thing and if we get a lot of rain in the heavily populated areas, the box-office goes up considerably. It’s been a while since we’ve had a 4th of July where we had a lot of rain, but the last time we did in 2001 it was crazy good at the box-office. The trick here is that the rain needs to happen during the day, it doesn’t seem to have the same effect at night. There are some Thunderstorms rolling around the US this weekend, mostly from Illinois down to Alabama, but outside of Chicago I’m not sure there’s enough population where it looks like it’s going to rain to make much of a difference. But we might have another weather related issue that could help us. As you may have heard (or are currently experiencing it), a good portion of the USA is going to be roasting this weekend, especially the heavily populated North East; and it might be something that’s severe enough to make moviegoing a good pivot activity, or maybe is just too hot to venture outside period. So we might have some weekend totals that change severely from Saturday morning to Monday morning. Since it’s really hot already, we probably would have seen some sort of effect already, but nothing looks abnormal right now. However, there might be something behavioral tomorrow when consumers have planned to do something outside that they can’t do, so they pivot to another out of the home activity.

Because the 4th is on a Saturday, unless the weather pushes the box-office up considerably tomorrow, we’ll probably be about 20% behind last year’s 4th of July weekend (Jurassic World Rebirth). And because next week we have the 3rd weekend in the trifecta of IP treatments that (probably) aren’t working out at the box-office the way they have in the past, and we don’t have an answer for Superman’s $125 million opening, we’ll be 20% to 25% behind next weekend as well. But after that we should be ahead of last year for a while.

Anyway, with the same expected accuracy as an actual injury when a World Cup player is rolling around in ‘excruciating’ pain* (and the NBA is taking notes) here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Despicable Me 7 Minions & Monsters - Now that we’re at the 7th version of this IP it seems to be following a familiar course; when we run out of ideas we just make a movie about ourselves. And as usual, the critics fawn and the public yawns; and since I’m always looking for ways to ‘compare and contrast’, the two films opening this weekend offer another opportunity to do that.

Also opening this weekend is Young Washington, from one of the (formerly Kingdom Stories, now The Wonder Project) Erwin Brothers who make movies that critics usually shit all over, sniffing that they are filled with ‘tired TV Movie tropes’, and their RT critics score is rarely above 55%; but always end up with A+ or A Cinemascores and RT Audience ratings in the high 90’s. I’ve heard from some of you that Minions & Monsters is a ‘love letter to Movies’, and clearly the critics feel it speaks to them (and the Liberal Arts Degree they’re still paying off), but with a (as of this writing) RT Audience score that’s considerably below the RT critics score, is the American Consumer saying ‘we’re tired of these same Entertainment Industry tropes’?

The grosses at this point are saying that this ‘love letter to Movies’ isn’t as broad as the last couple of films in the series; the gross on Wednesday was pretty good but the fans go opening day, but as we wander through the weekend you can see how broad the film plays once you run through the hard core fans. Thursday was a little short of where it should have been, and today it looks like it’s taking a step back as well. Based on what the business looked like the last time the 4th was Saturday, this should end up with a 3 day around $40 million, which would put the 5 day around $65 million. But depending on how this heat wave affects the box-office tomorrow, that could change severely.

Young Washington - Angel is a pretty frustrating company to watch, they clearly have tapped into an idea of ‘investors’ that are the core of the gross every time they open a movie. But they don’t seem to be able (or want) to expand that to the normal everyday moviegoer. They’ve clearly got a movie here that plays, with the usual excellent Audience ratings we see from the Erwin Brothers, but the grosses are like two different worlds. Salt Lake City is their core, and the grosses there are at a level of a movie that opens to $40 million. But even though there’s some good grosses in the better Red State theaters, most of the rest of the country looks like a movie that opens to $7 million. As much as what’s going to happen tomorrow is a major question with all the films this weekend, Angel is running a scheme** here where you can buy $5 tickets (through Angel) for shows after 5pm on the 4th, and we’ll have to see what that means. As with most Angel releases, it looks super pre-sale heavy today, and it’s not growing much. They didn’t report anything from opening day yesterday, but today looks like it might end up in the $6.5 million to $7 million range for Friday, so as a hipshot let’s say the Distribution Math version of today is about $8 million. If the weekend plays out like 2015 played out, that would put the weekend in the high teens. But looking at the revenue generated by their core ‘investors’, I have two questions; why can’t they spend some marketing dollars to activate the rest of moviegoers at the same level and why aren’t those same investors opting in for most of their other movies that all open in the mid single digits?

The Invite - Expanded to 28 runs and is now in 10 markets, looks like a psa in the high 20’s with a shot at 30.

Everyone have a great 4th and if you’re sweltering in the East, go see a movie and take some people with you.

• until everyone moves on and they are suddenly cured.

** I’ve been watching a lot of the World Cup, so the British commentators are clearly having an effect.