The biggest number September produces will not come from a September movie. Spider-Man: Brand New Day sits at $810.4M domestic and is going to pass Star Wars: The Force Awakens at $936,662,225 to become the highest-grossing domestic release ever made, and our read of the curve puts that happening in the back half of the month. That is the headline, and it belongs to a film that opened on July 31.
What September brings on its own is one real swing and a lot of mid-size. Resident Evil is the month’s only title with a genuinely high ceiling, and it arrives in the exact slot that has produced the four biggest September openings ever recorded. Around it sit a nostalgia sequel twenty-eight years in the making, a DreamWorks original, and the four-day Labor Day frame landing on the latest date the calendar allows.
September is a $520M to $630M month in a normal year and it has been for a decade. The one time it cleared $750M, a single horror film did $327.5M of it. That is the shape of the bet every September makes: the month has no tentpole floor, so it lives or dies on whether one genre swing connects. This year the swing is Resident Evil.
Spillover · Late AugustWhat August is handing over
A lot, and most of it is two films. Spider-Man will still be doing real weekly business into October, and our model has it finishing between $906.9M and $981.8M with a $944.9M midpoint on 2.62x legs. Call it $110M to $130M of that still to come, and a good chunk lands in September. The Odyssey is at $516.3M domestic on the leggiest run of the year, dropping -26% in its fifth weekend, and the model carries $533M to $609M with a $567M midpoint. It has $50M or so left and September takes most of it.
Below them the carryover thins out fast. Insidious: Out of the Further opens tonight and horror sequels do not have long tails. The End of Oak Street, PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie and the August 28 slate will add something, but nothing that changes a month. September gets two very large holdovers and then a cliff.
Weekend 1 · Sep 4–7The longest Labor Day the calendar allows
Fall 2: Deadpoint
The first Fall opened to $2.5M in August 2022 and finished at $7.2M domestic and $21.8M worldwide, which is a modest result until you learn it was made for about $3 million. Lionsgate is going out Wednesday to grab the full four days, and a sequel to a film people discovered on streaming rather than in theatres usually opens two to three times the original. That puts $4–7M in range and makes this profitable on the first weekend.
Nothing else opening this frame will trouble the top five. Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass goes out Friday through Viva Kids with a Warner Bros. Animation credit and a VOD date of October 3, which tells you what the theatrical run is for. By Any Means and Onslaught round out a frame with no wide studio release in it at all.
The interesting thing about this weekend is the date. Labor Day falls on September 7 this year, the latest it can possibly land, which means the four-day frame sits entirely in September and the summer season gets a nineteenth week it does not usually get. For the month that is a straight gift: Labor Day frames run $130M to $160M in a healthy year, and this one has Spider-Man and The Odyssey still on the chart to fill it. We have the frame at $130–150M, which would be September’s biggest week and it happens before a single September release opens wide.
Weekend 2 · Sep 11–13Twenty-eight years later
Practical Magic 2
The original grossed $46.9M domestic in 1998 and was written off as a flop on a $60M budget. It then spent twenty-eight years becoming the kind of film people quote, rewatch every October and buy candles about, which is a different asset entirely. Warner Bros. is releasing the sequel to that second audience, and both leads came back for it.
Boxoffice Pro has it at $30–40M and we are going slightly under at $26–34M. The bear case is that a cult built on twenty-eight years of home viewing does not always convert to opening weekend, and this is the year Moana proved nostalgia alone does not fill a room. The bull case is the calendar: this opens into the first weekend of spooky season with no horror competition until the following Friday, and it is the only wide release of the frame. If the CinemaScore comes in at A- or better this legs to $90M+ and becomes the month’s quiet win.
Two smaller openers share the date. Runner is a PG-13 thriller with no wide-release push behind it and The Uprising goes out the same day, both of them looking at single digits. This frame is Practical Magic 2 against whatever is left of the Labor Day holdovers, and we have it at $95–115M.
Weekend 3 · Sep 18–20The month’s only real ceiling
Resident Evil
Every one of the four biggest September openings ever is a horror film. It did $123.4M in 2017, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice $111.0M in 2024, It: Chapter Two $91.1M in 2019 and The Conjuring: Last Rites $84.0M last year. September is the month horror owns, and Sony has put an $80M R-rated reboot from the hottest director in the genre right in the middle of it.
Zach Cregger’s last two films were Barbarian, which opened to $10.5M and legged to $40.8M on a $4.5M budget, and Weapons, which opened to $43.5M and finished at $151.6M domestic and $266.0M worldwide on $30M. The trajectory is the point: he went from a festival curiosity to a $43M opener in three years, and this is his first film with a major IP and an IMAX release behind it. Quorum had it at 51% awareness and 52% interest at the start of August, which is where a $50M-plus opener sits at that distance.
We are calling $55–70M, which would be the biggest opening in the history of the Resident Evil franchise by a distance. The ceiling is real: if this plays as an event the way Weapons did, $80M is live and $200M domestic follows. The floor is that game adaptations still carry a discount with people who do not play the game, and the last attempt at this, Welcome to Raccoon City, is a reminder that the name alone sells nothing. On an $80M budget Sony needs roughly $200M worldwide to break even, and a $60M opening gets there in three weekends.
Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom opens the same day through GKIDS, and Aardman has never been a wide-release proposition in America. It is counterprogramming for the one audience Resident Evil cannot touch, and $3–6M is the range. We have the frame at $130–155M, which makes it September’s biggest non-holiday week.
Weekend 4 · Sep 25–27DreamWorks, and a ghost from 2019
Forgotten Island
DreamWorks has run this play before and it worked. The Wild Robot opened to $35.0M on September 27, 2024 and finished at $268.0M domestic, an original animated film with no franchise behind it that turned a soft opening into a 7.7x run because families kept coming back through October. Transformers One tried the same slot a week earlier that year, opened to $24.6M and stopped at $59.1M.
The difference between those two outcomes is entirely word of mouth, and that is what to watch here. We have the opening at $22–30M, below The Wild Robot, because Forgotten Island does not have a bestselling novel underneath it. What it does have is an empty family calendar until November and a genuinely distinctive hook. If the CinemaScore is an A this finishes north of $150M. If it is a B+ it stops around $80M, and there is not much space between those two futures on opening weekend.
The other September 25 release is the one worth noting for what it says about the month. Marvel is putting Avengers: Endgame back in theatres as Endgame Encore, with a new introduction, unseen footage and an end tag, in IMAX and the Infinity Vision houses, as the runway to Avengers: Doomsday in December. Re-releases of this scale do $5–15M. The timing is the story: Endgame returns to cinemas in the same month that Spider-Man passes its domestic total on the way to the all-time record.
The RecordSeptember is when the biggest movie ever gets decided
Force Awakens has held the domestic record for ten years and eight months. Brand New Day was $45.7 million ahead of it through nineteen days, has been ahead at every stage of the run, and only needs to keep behaving like a normal blockbuster from here. Our model puts the finish at $944.9M and we have said we expect north of $950M. The date to circle is somewhere in the back half of September, and it will most likely happen on a Saturday with no fanfare at all, because a film passing $936,662,225 in its eighth weekend does it on a $4M day.
What makes it worth watching is the scale of what it is displacing. This is a film that already holds the biggest opening weekend, the biggest opening day and the biggest preview night ever recorded, and the domestic crown is the last one left on the board. It will take it in a month with no tentpole, from a release that opened seven weeks earlier, while the film it passed on the way there is playing in the theatre next door.
The Bottom LineA quiet month with one loud number in it
September 2026 comes down to Resident Evil. Everything else on the calendar is a mid-size release with a mid-size ceiling, and the two films actually driving the month’s revenue both opened in July. If Cregger connects, the month clears $600M and finishes second only to 2017 in the last decade. If he does not, this lands around $520–550M and looks like every other September.
We have the month at $540–610M, which puts the midpoint just above 2025 and 2024 and well short of 2017. That is a fine result for a month with no tentpole in it, and it comes with the biggest domestic record in the medium changing hands somewhere around the third weekend. September does not have a big movie. It has the biggest one.