Second weekend of July 2026

I was anticipating a fallback from last year’s box-office (Superman) because this weekend was going to be legacy IP vs legacy IP, and the treatment of the IP was going to be the main factor. I’ll talk about that in depth below, but we’re only going to be able to produce about 65% of the gross we produced last year on this weekend, and we’ll give back about $70 million on the YTD. Next weekend should easily in the plus column again, and how much plus there is depends on how many moviegoers are okay with seeing The Odyssey in a non-PLF theater; but we’ve got a weird release calendar aberration in two weeks and because no one wanted to go between Odyssey and Spidey, there’s nothing being released there that will make much of a mark. Last year on that weekend we had Fantastic Four, so unless Odyssey pulls an Obsession and has an outlier weekend 2, we’ll give some more YTD back. But we have Spidey to come and save the day at the end of the month (unless we’re so sick of seeing Tom Holland and Zendaya from now until then), and we should be in the plus column for the rest of the Summer.

As I’ve been talking about here for the last couple of weeks, (including this weekend) we have a trifecta of Legacy IP’s that can teach us a lot about how to treat an IP. But because this business is hard, it’s not something where I can tell you ‘this is how you do it’, because that doesn’t exist. I think it’s more productive to look at how these films got to where they ended up, and although the (always dependable) idiot entertainment press has been talking about how dumb these failures were (and they’ll continue that this weekend), these films were shepherded by very smart people and in a ‘risk/reward’ business the path to market makes sense as long as you take a step back and look at how they got here; and by looking backwards, you can be smarter looking forward. In order of release, here’s my take on how these three Legacy IP’s ended up where they ended up.

Supergirl - Warning, although I’ll probably get accused of Mansplaining here, remember I’m a semi-trained part time amateur data scientist, so I’m merely pointing out the differences between one data set and another.

There was a lot of sound creative logic in the direction they went here, and when you’ve got an IP as big as this is, going the safe/down the middle route would probably have ended up pretty bland. Using source material like ‘Supergirl: The Woman of Tomorrow’ seemed like a good road to give this an edge, the idea they seemed to be trying to get to here was that she was not the perfect 21 year old Female; she was damaged, had a drinking problem and wanted nothing to do with her family. And by taking the Character in a direction like this you’re trying to expand the tent so Females (and especially Young Females) relate to it. Clearly that idea wasn’t enough so it resonated with the Female audience, but digging deeper there’s a subtle issue here that keeps coming up in Female Action Hero films.

A couple of weeks ago I pointed out that the biggest issue with Female Action Hero films is that Females aren’t showing up, it’s the same (older) dudes that show for all the action films*. Looking at Supergirl, Furiosa and Ballerina, is there anything uniquely female about any of those characters? If you take a step back, could you have made any of these three films with a Male in the role without serious rewrites? As much as they tried to make Supergirl anything but perfect, her behavior seemed to align more with what a 21 year old Male does (a lot of shots, shots, shots), and as much as a Female should feel able to do anything a Male can do, I’m not sure it’s an aspirational idea for Females as much as it is for Males. On the flip side, look at the film in this genre that broke out at the box-office, Wonder Woman. Diana had Steve, was still a badass, and didn’t depend on Steve; so she had it all. Clearly a love interest isn’t the solve for Females not showing, but it’s a clue; and the subtle idea here that we’re seeing is that Women want to be equal to Men, but they don’t want to be Men. So even though the idea of this character being more ‘human’ seemed like a good idea, there needed to be a layer to the character’s journey that tells the Female audience ‘I can relate to that’ instead of ‘yeah, that’s how my Brother (or Boyfriend) behaves’.

In a business where we’re always trying to push boundaries and do something that could easily go sideways; like making a film about ICE and Secret White Supremacist societies, but it’s also about the challenges of Family, Parenting and your kids living with your choices. Or an AA skewing film about Vampires and the Blues, but do it with an A list Actor playing twins…..nothing could possibly go wrong in either case. But it didn’t and that’s why taking a chance on doing Supergirl as a lonely disaffected 21 year old Female isn’t out of the ordinary, it just doesn’t work out sometimes. But as much as we learn from the successes, the misses are more interesting to look at, and we try to figure out what was missing, and take another chance on a different angle.

Minions & Monsters - This film got beat up by the press a lot more than it should have, and a couple aspects conspired against it that made the optics worse than they actually are. Since this was the 7th film in the Despicable Me/Minions series and they had done the Spy thing to death, doing something different was something very normal in our sector. As I pointed out last week, we love doing films about ourselves, so they did a ‘love letter to the movies’. They clearly made a good movie (or at least the critics loved it), but looking at the way the film played, it wasn’t the movie that the fanship wanted and they thought it was ‘fine’. And this is the classic discussion on an IP like this, should they have made another Spy movie? Of course it always could have been a worse result if they did, but because it was less than the other films in the series had done, it was beaten up by the press as disappointing. But it really wasn’t because looking at how the fans turned out on the opening Wednesday, had this film opened on a normal Friday, I’d guess that 3 day would be in the high 50’s with a shot at 60. And that would have put it in the same general range as the other recent films. But this had another aspect that was out of its control.

These films generally open on either 4th of July weekend or the weekend after, but Disney put their flag in the sand for this weekend pretty early and by the time this was ready to date, today was spoken for. But because the 4th of July is tied to…..the 4th of July, they were stuck with a weekend that has a terrible Saturday. So they opened on Wednesday and that idea introduces a whole new house of box-office horrors. As I’ve pointed out here over and over, the hard core fans go on the first day, so by going on a Wednesday you’re giving up a decent amount of tagalongs that don’t want to go out on a weeknight. But even though they made a film for the critics, the fans seemed to say ‘you didn’t want to go the Spy route again?’, and the decay curve over the first 5 days was steeper than it would have normally been. But Universal really didn’t have any choice because the 4th was on Saturday and they took their chances that the film would play, but it didn’t.

Bottom line here is that most of the ‘disappointing’ label here is tied to the tricky release date, and I’m not sure Universal could have done anything different. If this had opened on a non 4th of July summer weekend, the gross should have been good enough to get a pass from the press. As far as the content issue; should they have made a movie that was more in line with what we’ve seen from this IP? Maybe, but I’m guessing they did some research on that and it probably told them they needed to do something different this time. And being the successful people they are at Illumination, they probably kicked the tires on a lot of different ideas here, and decided to go this route. The downside of this idea is that the ‘let’s do show biz’ always plays in the room, because we love movies about ourselves, and that’s something they should have considered as well.

Moana - Disney has had more tough decisions to make on how to handle IPs than anyone else in town, but that comes with having so many. But they also have to manage those IPs between Theatrical and Disney+, and (just like a lot of other aspects to this business) you have to make decisions from a long range out and it’s hard to see around corners.

5 years ago we were still trying to understand the difference between all the new aspects to our business such as windows and Theatrical viability, and Moana was at the very top of the Disney IP food chain on the platform (and was the most watched Animated IP on the platform). Since Disney had been mining all of their top shelf Animated IP’s for Live Action versions, Moana was due for a Live Action Theatrical redo and it was just a question of when. Parallel to that, Disney was looking for IP’s to mine of the platform (and there were some internal squirmishes about who got access to what), there was a parallel project based on Moana for the platform, but it was going to be in the TV Series format. As the story goes, the initial assemblies of storyboards on the Moana 2 TV series were so good, everyone felt they should repackage it and go theatrical, plus they had a TBD release date saved that year (2024) over Thanksgiving with nothing to put there. However, they were also really pregnant with the Live Action remake, so one couldn’t possibly affect the other, could it? Well, sometimes you don’t know until you know; so they upgraded Moana 2, it did $1 Billion in WW box-office and now we have the A list Live Action version that cost a little less than twice as much to make that’s going make less than half as much at the box-office. The funny thing here is that as much as this seems like a loss, I’d pump the brakes on that.

Looking at how Disney used another IP like Star Wars on the platform in TV series form, it seemed to make the Star Wars brand (with Grogu) much less valuable theatrically because we just had it on the platform. So it’s a similar situation to Moana and maybe the IP needs to rest a while, and yes these Moana grosses this weekend aren’t anything close to what Moana 2 did 19 months ago; but the fact that they elevated Moana 2 to Theatrical means they ended up with $1 billion in Theatrical revenue that they wouldn’t have had if it had stayed a TV series on the platform. And if Moana 2 had stayed a TV series, looking at the results of Grogu, this Moana probably wouldn’t have done any better because the IP had just been on the platform.

There’s another interesting Disney IP comparison to consider here. Go on RT and look at the reviews on the 2026 Moana, currently at 35%; you’ll see a lot of ‘this is a shot by shot remake of the original film, and a mediocre one at that’. Now go look at the reviews for the 2019 version of The Lion King, which are at 52%; you’ll see a lot of ‘this is a shot by shot remake of the original film, and a mediocre one at that’. The Lion King opened to $192 million, however the next dip into The Lion King’s (disappearing) pond 5 years later, Mufasa, opened to only $35 million. So there’s a lesson learned here about IP management. However, once this Moana runs it’s course Theatrically, if you pool the cost and the revenue of Moana 2 and this Moana, it’s probably a big win…what the kids would call 6 7.

Anyway, with the same expected accuracy as Meta describing Muse as a ‘useful tool’, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Moana - It’s looking a lot like Lightyear right now, but it might be a little better on the west coast than Lightyear because of the population of Pacific Islanders on the west coast, but figure it’s in the mid/high 40’s.

Minions & Monsters - Since last Friday was a holiday, it’s way down today (along with everything else), but it should right itself tomorrow and finish the weekend down 45% or so for a gross around $20 million.

Toy Story 5 - Should be right behind Minions at 18 or 19.

Evil Dead …… wait what’s this one called again?… oh yeah…Burn - It’s been running about 2/3 of Evil Dead Rise which would put it at $14 million or so.

Young Washington - Going to be interesting to watch this film tomorrow. The $5 ticket promotion last weekend was really successful and it played like gangbusters to its target audience, but I’m not sure if they’ve run through them or this has had its day. For now, I’ll say it’s down 65% for a weekend around $8 million.

The Invite - Expanded to 1600 runs and it’s looking like a weekend around $4 million.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass - There’s a couple decent grosses in LA and NY, but other than that there’s nothing going on here. Looks like a weekend just short of $1 million.

• and too often they show up alone, which for a female skewing film is troubling in a different way.