Third weekend of July 2026

As expected the box-office is going to pop back into the plus column when we look back at the same weekend last year (I Know What You Did Last Summer, Smurfs, Eddington), we’re going to add a substantial chunk of revenue to the YTD surplus. Next weekend is a little trickier, only because we’re going to be dealing with the $117.6 million gross from Fantastic Four and the new movies next weekend will be a small fraction of what that film did on Thursday. Because next weekend has an iffy slate of films (for this time of the Summer), we should be way behind; but because of the PLF situation on The Odyssey we could see an outlier 2nd weekend that could mitigate a decent amount of the shortfall (more on that below). But weekend after next we’ve got Spider-Man and just that gross should equal or best the entire business from the same weekend last year (The Bad Guys 2, Naked Gun, Together), so we’ll be off and running again after that.

Clearly one of the aspects of this weekend’s opening of The Odyssey is it’s the first film to shoot entirely in 70mm IMAX, and because the Marketing materials on this film made it very clear there was a right way (and in theory a wrong way) to see the film, it’s going to be interesting to see if the consumer decides to see it this weekend in a ‘normal’ theater or wait until they can see it ‘the right way’. Now, the playability so far is exceptional, so there’s going to be an aspect to the rest of the run where the ‘water cooler’ aspect should help; but that PLF/non PLF aspect will be interesting to watch.

We’ve seen examples of this before, a couple of years ago when Avatar: The Way of Water opened the PLF’s dominated and we saw a decent amount of consumer behavior where they waited until they could see it ‘correctly’. But that was over Christmas and there was the additional seasonal component of ‘I really want to see it opening weekend, but I’ve got nothing but time the week after Christmas, so that works too’. But we have a different attendance cadence in the Summer, and that showed up on Top Gun Maverick. Once the presales filled up the PLF theaters, consumers eventually had no problem opening weekend seeing it in a non-PLF theater.

What’s super interesting to me, because I’m of a certain age and I spend a couple of nights a week in a Non PLF theater, I’m wondering if it’s worth all the trouble. Maybe that’s because I went to see The Odyssey in a 70mm IMAX theater last night that had a presentation that was kinda wonky*; but even putting the tech issues aside, if I went back to see it a 2nd time, I’m not sure I’d take the time to see it that way again.

It’s not like way back when and most theaters were optical mono sound, so not only did you crawl through cut glass to see a 70mm 6 track Dolby presentation, you would probably drive right by a couple of normal theaters just to see it with Optical Dolby Sound 2.0; and if a theater had multiple screens only the biggest house had stereo. But when the exhibitors evolved to bigger megaplexes in the 90’s and then to Stadium Seating in the early 2000’s, they started equipping all screens with stereo. So where there used to be a massive difference, because almost all Theaters have Stereo now and quite a few are transitioning to laser projectors, is PLF just a branding thing? It just doesn’t seem that different to me. I’m wondering if you took an average moviegoer and put them in each format, could they tell the difference without the Branding?

Obviously this is as tricky as it gets from a Marketing standpoint. The PLF branding, especially IMAX, seems to generate a lot of purchases and does a nice job of separating what Theatrical provides compared to staying at home. But is there a way to say “the other theaters (especially with the recent upgrades in seats and amenities like Bar and Food options) are great too”? A bunch of the circuits have been experimenting with various IMAXish brands like XL, Prime, XD, etc and the only one that seems to stick is Dolby. But with the dual projector setup, the brightness and clarity of the picture is pretty easy to identify. Since we have a film this weekend that should be pretty leggy, it will be interesting to see how the consumers behave during the next couple of weeks, especially week after next where Spidey will take a decent amount of the PLFs and the non PLFs will be the majority of the seat inventory.

Anyway, based on something I learned on Tik Tok from the Midwest Taco Bell/GLP challenge, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

The Odyssey - There has been a lot of talk leading up to this weekend comparing it back to the opening weekend of Oppenheimer, and the question on Oppenheimer was ‘did the Barbie aspect help it or hurt it?’. On a 2 to 1 basis, most of the people in the industry I spoke to thought Barbie helped it and it would have been a little worse had it been on its own. The data today doesn’t support that train of thought, the grosses today are considerably better than Oppenheimer assuming they have the same appeal. Of course, as I point out quite regularly here, tagalongs are important and having them all to yourself is a pretty good thing. But the bigger question here, and it will dictate where this ends up at the end of the weekend, are moviegoers cool with seeing this in a non-PLF theater if the PLF’s are sold out? That’s what happened with Top Gun Maverick and the weekend forecasts kept growing over the weekend, so it will be interesting to section out each day over the weekend and see if the % of sales for a PLF theater drops as we get through the weekend.

The grosses so far are spectacular and as an example of how powerful the sales aspect of the IMAX 70MM thing is (and it’s not just a blue state coastal thing), a theater smack dab in the middle of Red America, the Opry Mills in Nashville is going toe to toe gross wise with Universal City and The Metreon San Francisco. So it’s playing pretty broad, and not totally upscale, it’s more about the availability of seats in PLF theaters. At this point it looks like it’s somewhere in the $110 to $120 million range, which would put it at #5 in all time R rated openings behind the 3 Deadpool’s and It. You might say that this is different because it’s not Book or Comic Book IP, but to call this Original IP is kinda weird because it’s really Original IP, like crazy original IP. The exits here are sensational so this should be around for a while and the only thing standing in its way is the PLF bottleneck in a couple of weeks with Spider-Man.

Moana - The exits were actually fine last week, and it’s not terrible today. Figure it’s off a normal 55% for this time of year and a gross somewhere around $20 million.

• a couple of years ago on opening Thursday I went to see Oppenheimer in IMAX at Del Amo and popped my head in the 70mm screen to see how it looked. The print was already scratched, so for exhibition, this whole format thing is their version of ‘this business is hard’.