Fifth weekend of July 2026

We always knew this weekend was easily going to beat the same weekend in 2025 (The Bad Guys 2, Naked Gun, Together), but what we didn’t know is that we would beat the whole weekend by around 10am this morning, and we’re now more than likely going to have the best weekend in the history of Theatrical. So for the rest of the weekend we’ll be adding more padding to our year to date; but that’s just what Spidey is doing, it will be even better when you add in what the rest of the films will contribute (especially The Odyssey), and that will be what gives us a new record for the weekend.

The exhibitors are giving us a history lesson today and they’re taking us back to the late 70’s and the 80’s. Back then most of the ‘multi-plex’s’ were Twins, Tri-plex’s, 4 plex’s and the really big theaters had 6 screens. If you look at the showtimes at the theaters near you, you’ll see what I’m talking about, there’s Spidey, Odyssey and then maybe there’s a Moana or a Toy Story, and everything else is there ‘technically’ but it’s only playing at 10am or 10pm; so in theaters that have 18 screens, 12 of the screens (and in some of them more) are playing Spidey. I heard a rumor that AMC has changed their website so that instead of publishing showtimes it just says ‘come by and we’ll start a show when you get here’. The exhibitors have given Spidey an amount of shelf space that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, and just as a guess I’d say they have 60% of the seats nationally this weekend. And that brings up an interesting question, what would a gross on a big film like this look like if we didn’t turn anyone away? We might have gotten an answer on that with yesterday’s gross because it was so much bigger than the other opening day grosses, and that could just be because of the seats. But there’s a 2nd part of that question, what does the rest of the weekend look like? Because there’s so much inventory how front loaded is this going to be or is it going to follow a normal Marvel pattern? More on that below but it’s going to be an interesting weekend to watch as it unfolds.

As much as analogue Film is having a moment now with The Odyssey, this is one of the components we always imagined when we were trying to figure out the puzzle of switching over to digital projection (and who would pay for it). Now that it’s just a question of pressing a button and having a film show in as many theaters as you want, the exhibitors just cleared out the rest of the plex and went crazy. It’s actually kind of an accomplishment for Disney to have as many Moana’s and Toy Story’s still out there full schedule, that couldn’t have been easy. And there’s a logic to what the exhibitors did with The Odyssey as well, the consumer has followed Universal’s instructions and are seeing it in IMAX and 70mm, and because that lack of demand outside the PLF’s, the exhibitors were able to say ‘they don’t need the other (standard digital) theaters, we’ll just give them to Spidey’. On the flip side, thank goodness that they were bound by the commitment to The Odyssey and IMAX, otherwise they would have fucked over Odyssey without thinking twice about it and Spidey would be doing even better.

But enough about how the exhibitors (finally) did something smart, let’s talk about how dumb they are, and let’s throw in the Guilds and the various AG’s in certain states with them.

I’m super confused about all the pushback to the Paramount Warners deal, and the reason I’m confused is because I know how we got here. For those of you who don’t remember, this is a Corporate Management team that had such contempt for our business that the key decision maker (and of course, just like the others he was a Harvard MBA who didn’t know our business very well) put on his ‘Disruptor Man!’ suit and put all of their films on streaming day and date with Theatrical in 2021. Now let’s put aside that HBO and whatever is left of MAX aren’t any better off than they would have been had this not happened, but it was an insanely expensive idea and of course, the streaming wars were expensive for everyone; it’s the reason Paramount is now owned by Skydance. But not only did they miscalculate the amount of high scenario backend money they had to pay the talent (who had backend, which was rumored to be close to 10 figures), but there was another little bit of a financial hit. They chased away Christopher Nolan, who was a solid Warners family member up until then. Now you’re missing $1 billion in Theatrical gross plus all the downstream revenue that Oppenheimer generated, and a Best Picture Oscar. And that loss doubles with what The Odyssey is doing, plus another possible Best Picture Oscar. These things matter, would Paramount have been in trouble had they kept the rights to Yellowstone for Paramount Plus instead of selling the first couple seasons to Peacock (which was apparently more of a timing thing)?

Warners is being sold because Senior Management made so many bad decisions that piled on top of each other, such as the $3 billion + that flew out the door because of 2021, having so much debt made it unsustainable. And to be clear, this isn’t the same situation as when Fox was sold to Disney. Once we saw what that Fox slate looked like when it got over to Disney and hit theaters, Rupert clearly looked at it and said something like ‘this team is steering me into a wall, I gotta get out’. Warners (and HBO) are at the top of their game creatively, it’s their bosses that were not.

With all that being said, circling back to my confusion about why the Guilds, the Exhibitors and the AG’s are pushing back; are they telling us ‘let’s stop this, we’re hooking our Wagon to those guys! They tried to ruin the business once, more please’ Huh? My Dad had an expression that said ‘if you wish in one hand and poop in the other, guess which one is going to get full first?’ And it seems like all the blowback and stalling of this deal could make the non-wishing hand for a lot of people very full.

My Dad had another expression ‘people tell you who they are by their actions, if you watch closely they’ll tell you who they are’. I’ve just run down how Warner’s Corporate Management has been telling us who they are, but let’s talk about the other players.

When Skydance bought Paramount, David Ellison proclaimed that he valued Theatrical and promised that they would double their Theatrical output very quickly. They had 8 wide releases in 2025 and they have 14 wide releases this year, so he did what he said he was going to do. On the other hand, back in November Netflix announced they had won the bidding for WB, and then after some pushback in the press, suddenly (actually it was almost a week) said ‘oh…..yeah…..we love theatrical too….yay theatrical….’. But they’ve been saying ‘yay…theatrical’ for 10 years now and it’s been total bullshit. It’s mostly been because of their Impostor Syndrome and they want to win Oscars for their TV movies, and the Academy (and the guilds) can’t wrap their heads around the difference between the letter of the rules and the intent of the rules. Some you might respond with ‘what about Cliff Booth and Narnia’; ummm, no, definitely ain’t gonna happen on Cliff Booth and on Narnia I’ll believe it when I see it. If they give more than 1 show a day to Cliff Booth, then the Exhibitors and IMAX are just doing the dumb things that they normally do because Netflix will put all the Marketing Weight behind the drop on the platform. If they give Cliff Booth more shows, then they are taking them from the other movies that are spending well into 8 figures on a Theatrical Marketing Campaign. On Narnia it’s more complicated because it’s a weird weekend (the Superbowl and Valentine’s Day is on Sunday that weekend) and there might be a favorable enough competitive landscape to accomplish something. But I still don’t believe they’ll spend the money on the Theatrical Marketing campaign. Their C Suite has consistently said ‘we want people to watch our content on the platform’, and their actions (the Marketing campaigns) back that up. So yeah, if they love Theatrical…yay… prove it.

Of course a lot of the pushback has been linked to the ‘c’ word, competition. I understand that’s a concern, but my point here is ‘are the alternatives to this deal better or worse?’. The current WB Corporate management is the reason this is being sold, and they’ve financially run this company into a ditch, and if you give them more time the ditch is just going to get deeper; and the other bidders seem worse to me. Netflix is in the TV Movie business and those pay less than Theatrical does (with no backend), so by having a bigger piece of the pie they can drive costs down. There’s nothing they have shown us that says they will keep WB as a Theatrical label. Moving HBO to part of Netflix seems less competitive than HBO and Paramount Plus combining; and of course there’s CNN, and that’s a more complex issue. Comcast had a cup of coffee at the negotiation table but seems like a worse choice as well.

So when you take a few steps back and compare the alternatives, I don’t see a better path. You’ve got a Billionaire who seems to really love this business to the point that he’s talked his family into risking a big portion of what they’ve built on this deal. On the Theatrical side he’s promised that both companies will have robust outputs, and looking at what he’s done very quickly at Paramount to increase output, I’d believe him more than I believe the other players. Obviously there are going to be layoffs when you combine the companies, but the way WB is going financially, the job losses might be worse if they continue on the path they were on. There’s the political side of the Family which seems to concern everyone, but the market will dictate how that goes. As that expression the Far Right keeps flogging us with says ‘go woke, go broke’, there’s two sides to that idea and the ratings out of CBS aren’t saying anything good about what they have been pivoting to. So who knows what that will look like in the future.

As much as I drag the Ivy MBA’s for not knowing the business, I guess I should throw the Exhibitors, the Guilds and the State AG’s in the same bucket of people who don’t know our business. Because with all this ‘stop the merger’ stuff going on, I keep asking ‘and then what?’ And if they don’t come up with an answer we’re all going to have our non-wishing hand full.

Anyway, based on something I heard during Happy Hour in Tony Romo’s Car, here are some thoughts on the weekend Box-office.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day - As you’ve probably heard, this had a great opening day yesterday and it’s just as good today. But in my role as a part time amateur data scientist, it’s always fun to look at one piece of data and see how it relates to another piece of data. Looking at what this is doing today and looking at the $260 million No Way Home did in 2021, No Way Home had a terrible release date and was held down by that release date.

It’s interesting to me that in the 6 years since the Covid shutdown, No Way Home was the highest opening weekend and nothing has really threatened it. Deadpool & Wolverine was the only other film to break $200 million (since Covid) and was 20% short of No Way Home at $211 million. And looking at Brand New Day vs No Way Home is there anything that tells me that Brand New Day should be considerably better? Not really, and since No Way Home spent almost 24 hours at 100% Rotten Tomatoes and Brand New Day was about 10 points behind that for the first 24 hours, plus No Way Home had the 3 Spider-Men reunion thing going on, shouldn’t No Way Home be better?

And that’s where my part time amateur data scientist thing comes in, is this way better because No Way Home was on a date that held the gross down because there were two consumer based marketplace forces at odds with each other? As I’ve pointed out here before, during the Christmas moviegoing season, the weeks before Christmas are challenging to get consumers to a theater because their ‘to do’ list is so long and challenging. However, one of the aspects that make Marvel movies so huge on opening weekend is they suck up all the tagalongs when it becomes ‘a thing’, the casual and non-fans want to be part of the party; but if you lose them on opening weekend they ain’t gonna go on their own. So that leaves the ‘strength of fanship’ as a key clutter breaker that generates a purchase in the weeks before Christmas, and the tagalongs that you get this time of year would love to join the party but they’re too busy at Christmas, so No Way Home got held down by the lower tag along factor. But there’s another problem with having a Marvel film the week before Christmas, the multiple off opening weekend for that time of year should be in the 5 or 6 range, and No Way Home was abysmally low at 3.1. Christmas is the only time of the year where consumers wait until after Christmas to see it when they have time, that’s why the multiples off the opening weekend are bigger. Looking at the 2nd best opening since Covid, Deadpool & Wolverine, which opened on the 2024 equivalent of this weekend, the multiple was exactly the same as No Way Home. So putting a Marvel movie on the weekend before Christmas doesn’t take advantage of what Marvels can do because it just can’t happen the same way that time of year, and you’re giving up the 8 Golden Day’s advantage of Christmas because your core already went (without their friends).

But looking back at December 2021, this was a godsend for Theatrical, and it was very good for the sector (and we needed it badly back then). So by putting a Superhero movie at Christmas, it may not be the best thing for the studio, but it’s good for Theatrical.

The numbers today are a little better than Avengers: Endgame so with their better opening day yesterday and some other Previews they had on Wednesday (that will magically get added into today’s gross, courtesy of Distribution Math), this really has to stub it’s toe tomorrow or Sunday to not break the all time ‘weekend’ record of $357 million. It’s interesting to look at where it’s playing strongest, which is hard to see because it’s so strong everywhere; but even though this is Sony and not Disney, all that work Disney has put into the Marvel brand with Hispanics is paying off big time today.

The Odyssey - They lost a lot of screens this week (not theaters, but screens in the theater), but they kept a lot of the formats that people care about so at this point it’s not a disaster. It’s plausible that this could only drop about 40% from last weekend, which would put it in the mid 50’s.

Both Toy Story 5 and Moana don’t look half bad today, thanks to Disney digging in and keeping it on screen. Both look down about 35% which would put them both around $6 million.

I Want Your Sex - Went 500 runs and there’s some decent numbers in LA and NY, but not much else going on. Figure it’s about $500k or so.