Minions, Moana, Myths, and Marvel

Illumination does what Illumination does: drops a Minions movie into the July 4 corridor and prints money. Tracking has Minions & Monsters at $75–85M for the three-day and $95–115M across the five-day holiday, right in line with where this franchise lives. The genius of the play is the cost — a reported $85M budget, even cheaper than The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’s $110M, which means it only needs roughly $275M worldwide to be profitable and should clear that on domestic alone. The comp is Minions: The Rise of Gru ($107M opening, $369M domestic on the back of the “Gentleminions” moment); we don’t need that ceiling here, but $300M+ domestic is very much in play and the international number on these is always monstrous. The only real question is whether Moana nine days later steals some of the back-half family run. This is the month’s safest bet, full stop.

Angel Studios slots Young Washington into the Fourth of July weekend with the most on-the-nose counterprogramming imaginable — a young-George-Washington origin story for the patriotic crowd that isn’t buying tickets to Minions. Jon Erwin directs a surprisingly stacked cast (Ben Kingsley, Kelsey Grammer, Andy Serkis, Mary-Louise Parker), and Angel’s grassroots / faith-audience playbook gives it a real floor. Sound of Freedom’s $184M run is the once-in-a-decade outlier, not the expectation; the realistic range is a low-double-digit opening and a leggy mid-tier finish if word of mouth holds. It won’t move the month’s ceiling, but it’s exactly the kind of cheap, durable adult/family alternative that pads a holiday frame.

Disney goes back to the live-action remake well with arguably its best brand to do it — the original Moana was the most-streamed movie on the planet for two straight years, so the awareness here is sky-high. Dwayne Johnson returns in the flesh as Maui, newcomer Catherine Laga’aia plays Moana, and Thomas Kail (Hamilton) directs. Three-week tracking has it at $85M opening, with a wider $80–105M band. The comps tell the whole story: The Lion King ($191M opening, $543M domestic) is the dream ceiling, Mufasa ($35M opening) is the cautionary floor, and last year’s How to Train Your Dragon live-action ($84.6M opening) is the realistic middle. We land around $240–305M domestic. The catch is the math: a $200M+ budget needs roughly $500M worldwide to break even, so “solid” and “profitable” aren’t the same conversation. Releasing nine days after Minions is the risk — there’s only so much family money in early July — but the demo skews a touch older and the brand should carve out its own lane.

This is the one. The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan’s first film since Oppenheimer ($82M opening, $330M domestic, $975M worldwide on 4.0x legs), it’s the first feature ever shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, and it carries a $250M budget and a cast that reads like a who’s-who — Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, plus Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, and Lupita Nyong’o. Variety has floated it as the year’s highest-grossing film, and those 70mm IMAX showings sold out within twelve hours of going on sale. So why the wide range? A casting controversy has dogged the production for months, and the latest tracking shows general-audience interest softening even as the Nolan die-hards stay locked in. That’s the binary: if it plays like Oppenheimer — front-loaded IMAX premium, then word-of-mouth legs through August — it’s a $300M+ domestic, $800M+ worldwide monster and the biggest film of 2026. If the backlash truly bites and it opens in the $50s and legs like a normal tentpole, a $250M budget suddenly needs $600M+ worldwide just to feel safe, and July’s ceiling comes down with it. There is no film on the 2026 calendar with a wider outcome range. We’re splitting the difference at a $55–95M opening and watching the Thursday-night IMAX number like hawks.

Horror has quietly been one of the best stories of the 2026 summer — Backrooms smashed the A24 record at $81.5M opening, and the genre keeps converting cheap budgets into clean profit. Evil Dead Burn is the sixth film in the series, a standalone sequel to Evil Dead (2013) and Evil Dead Rise, directed by Sébastien Vanicèk (Infested) with Sam Raimi producing. The number to beat is Evil Dead Rise’s $24.5M opening and $147.1M worldwide; we have Burn opening in the mid-$20Ms on its way to $80–100M domestic and another nine-figure worldwide run. On a sub-$25M budget that’s a tidy win no matter what, and it gives the back half of July a reliable counter to all the four-quadrant tentpoles. Not a needle-mover for the month’s ceiling, but exactly the kind of dependable mid-summer horror play that keeps the calendar from going soft.

The biggest movie of the summer opens on the very last day of July, which makes it a fascinating asterisk for this preview. Spider-Man: Brand New Day — Tom Holland’s fourth solo outing — just posted the best single-day domestic presales of any film in five years and has cleared $120M in global pre-sales, blowing past No Way Home’s previous $78M record. That points to a No Way Home-adjacent launch (that film opened to $260M); even a conservative read lands it comfortably north of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’s $187M. The one wrinkle worth flagging: Nolan’s Odyssey has monopolized the world’s IMAX screens deep into the summer, so Spider-Man may open without its premium-format dollars — a real, if modest, drag on the opening. For July’s ledger, though, none of this matters much: opening on a Friday means only the single day counts toward the month, maybe $50–65M of it. The fireworks — a likely $1B+ worldwide run — are an August story we’ll dig into in next month’s preview.