First weekend of August 2026
The box-office is in rarefied air right now, and not only are we going to soundly beat the total from this weekend last year (Weapons, Freakier Friday and Sketch; and we’ll come close to doubling the total), but continuing the momentum of the best weekend of all time and the highest opening weekend of all time last weekend, we’re in the hunt to have the best first weekend of August of all time, beating 2016 (Suicide Squad). But it doesn’t stop there, because both of our lead horses should be around for a while (and it will be especially interesting to watch the grosses on The Odyssey as they get some of their PLF screens back), we are in the hunt to have the best all time total for each calendar weekend for the rest of August.
The rest of the year looks good too, we’ve got a couple of weeks in early September that had some outlier performances on them, like Conjuring and Demon Slayer, but we’ve got some really promising films in our quiver this year and Q4 should be pretty good. This is the last Friday of most of the kids being on Summer Break, they start going back next week and by this time next week, half will be back in class. How fast did the Summer fly by?
There are a lot of lessons to be learned from last weekend, like there are every weekend (including this one), and there are a lot of interesting things to point out today.
As I suspected, Spidey had about 60% of all the seats last weekend, and that’s a level of retail shelf space we’ve never seen before. As much as it’s a good thing business wise to have seating inventory that rises to demand, because you can’t count on anyone coming back later if they get turned away, there’s also another aspect to that amount of seats; convenience. The Megaplexes all had 10+ screens of Spidey last weekend and that means showtimes every 10 or 15 minutes. And since a lot of those showtimes were added to the inventory last Tuesday and Wednesday once the Exhibitors had cleared out the rest of the films, once the film started tipping after the Premier and the lift of the review embargo, there were a lot of new seats available. Pro-tip, on these really big movies just wait to buy tickets for opening weekend until the Tuesday before opening, you’ll have a lot of choices for good seats at reasonable showtimes. You won’t get in the PLF’s because those are long gone, but I personally think the PLF’s are pretty overrated. But if the exhibitors hadn’t gone all in on seats last week, when the movie tipped mid week last week, I’m not sure we could have generated the number it got to.
As I said last week, something as big as this is all about the Party, and it becomes what it becomes because so many people want to come to the party; you don’t know the hosts and you kinda know a couple people going but you hear it’s a great party, so let’s go. Because our sector has so much more competition than it did 10 years ago (similar to most entertainment sectors), the time of year is really important. How many times have you thrown a party or had an event, and when you invite people that say ‘we’d love to but…….’, that’s the same issue here. And that’s why I’m really fascinated by how much better Brand New Day did in comparison to No Way Home. It’s really hard to get people to do anything in the weeks before Christmas, and it’s rare that we get to compare a very similar release that went at Christmas to one that went in the heart of the Summer. Clearly there’s an aspect here that makes it a little different, No Way Home was December 2021 and the theaters had only been open to full capacity for about 6 months, so it’s possible there was a little bit of a haircut because some tag alongs weren’t ready to go back yet. But because there’s such a profound difference in the opening weekend, the market is telling us how to date films at Christmas.
One of the aspects I pointed out last week is how No Way Home had a 3 multiple off opening weekend at Christmas, and films that open the weekend before Christmas usually have a 5 or better; Deadpool & Wolverine had a similar multiple opening in late July. One of the key aspects to Christmas is you play long and it’s not all about opening weekend, because those golden 8 days between Christmas and New Year’s are a Friday night every night; but if you’ve got a film that doesn’t play that way you’re wasting gross in two ways. Because it’s the weekend before Christmas you lose some audience because ‘they’d love to…..but’, and they won’t go on their own during the golden 8 days. Looking back at some of the similar genre (and Audience skew) films at Christmas, like the Star Wars films, you see the same thing. The best of them, Star Wars VII, only had a 3.8 multiple but they also had a Friday Christmas Day in their 2nd weekend; so they had a calendar based boost. But 3.8 is still below norm for the weekend before Christmas, and the other two Star Wars films didn’t break a 3 multiple. But that doesn’t mean all of the tentpoles that go at Christmas perform the same way. If you look at some other monster hits at Christmas like the Avatar sequels, Way of Water had a pretty normal 5.1 multiple off opening weekend and Fire and Ash was a little below 5, but it didn’t have great playability. Aquaman went the week before Christmas and had a 5 multiple.
Looking at how much better Brand New Day did than No Way Home on opening weekend, you can only wonder how much bigger the Star Wars films would have been in July when everyone could join the party? If you look at the Star Wars films that went in May, like Solo, it had about the same multiple as Episode IX which went at Christmas (and had similar playability), and as tough as the playability was on Grogu this year, the multiple is in the same neighborhood as Episode IX. Using the same logic about Christmas vs Summer and turning around to Summer vs Christmas, I’m guessing that both Solo and Grogu would have done about 2/3 of what they did in the summer had they gone at Christmas.
Why is it this way? Could it just be a behavioral thing because Marvel Films don’t go at Christmas and the fans don’t attend with the same cadence? We might have trained the non fans to go on opening weekend with the fans, or not go at all; and (mostly) Disney has been very good at convincing those non fans to join the party, and the 2nd weekend party just isn’t as attractive as the first weekend party (no matter what time of year it is). That would make Avatar’s multiple make sense, the first one went at Christmas and played and played and played, so there was no historical FOMO factor like there is with Marvel (and I’ll consider Star Wars Marvel adjacent).
But since I’m a part time amateur data scientist, what does the data say? Since Marvel changed the game with Spider-Man in 2002 there have been 71 wide Marvel releases, and how many have gone at Christmas? One out of 71, Spider-Man No Way Home. So just looking at the difference between No Way Home and Brand New Day, maybe this is just a behavioral thing, but what can we do about it? On one hand it’s a sample of one, so statistically it could be an aberration; but on the other hand it might be something that tells us we either have to make week 2 and 3 make more sense to the consumers (who don’t stay to watch the post credit sequence), or if we do that are we ruining the sensational first weekend for the rest of the slate that doesn’t go on Christmas?
Choices like this are why this business is hard.
Anyway with the same expected accuracy as seeing an entire show of The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX at The Colorado Center in Denver, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day - They got the IMAX’s this week and that should prop the gross up a little, but it’s pretty much doing the same thing it did last Friday in relation to Avengers: Endgame, it’s a little ahead of it. We’ll see if it follows the same pattern as it did last weekend and it’s not up as much from Friday tomorrow and it has a little better Sunday than Avengers (which is normal because Sunday’s in August are better than Sunday’s in May). But the drop looks very similar so figure it ends up about the same -60% from last weekend for a weekend of about $150 million.
The Odyssey - Even though they lost most of their IMAX runs, it’s still holding really nicely, and we should see some rock solid hold weeks in August as it gets a lot of those PLF’s back. It looks a little behind the drop from last week so figure it’s down -45% for a weekend in the high 20’s.
One Night Only - Every once in a while, there’s a script that is running around and for some reason it gets sent to me for my opinion (sometimes from a couple of different people); this was one of those scripts. Everyone seemed to really like it because of the concept, Sex was illegal for Single people and it was only allowed on One Day, so it was The Purge meets Anyone But You. I thought the script was fine and pretty much a basic ‘by the numbers’ rom com, but I kept bumping on the concept. How can you explain the ‘world’ in materials without taking forever and sounding dark? My opinion was pretty much ‘pass’, but it got made with two likeable up and coming actors.
Universal is very good at the Marketing game, and if there was a way to get at the ‘Purge for Sex and 20 somethings’ in the materials, they would have done it. But clearly they couldn’t and the only other option was pretend this was a normal world and sell it as just a ‘by the numbers’ rom com (with two likeable up and coming stars), and that usually equals mid/high single digits; which is what we’ve got here. But here again we’ve got a compare and contrast situation with Christmas vs Summer because this is the director of Anyone But You, has the same RT score as Anyone But You and it’s opening to the same number as Anyone But You. But here’s an interesting thought, even though Anyone But You opened to the same number as this, it had the 8 golden days in week 2 and because of the online hijinx of Sydney and Glen on opening weekend, it used that golden 8 days of Christmas to slingshot from a $6 million opening weekend into an $88 million cume. Could that have happened if Anyone But You opened the first weekend of August? I’m not so sure it would have done it without those golden 8 days. Some films belong at Christmas and can soar, some don’t. But this looks like the same $7 million or $8 million we normally see from a film like this.
Super Troopers 3 - The last Super Troopers opened to a really surprising $15 million but it was crowd funded, and half of that first weekend gross (and a quarter of the total domestic cume) came in during the first 36 hours. So it’s curious to see that this got made without those ‘shareholders’, and the gross shows a more true value of the IP. Looks like about $3 million for the weekend.
The Ice Cream Man - Went 1600 runs and looks like $1.5 million for the weekend.
Tony - Went exclusive NY/LA in the classic 6, and the grosses are very good across the board. NY is a little better than LA but that might be more of a capacity thing, and this looks headed for a gaudy Psa of $60k to $70k.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma - Went 5 runs, 3 in LA and 2 in NY and it’s pretty good. The gross at the Angelika in Lower Manhattan is half their total gross (there’s a Q and A tonight there) but the other grosses are good as well, looks like a strong Psa of $40k to $50k, depending on what the Q and A situation looks like the rest of the weekend.