Summer 2026 Recap: a deep-dive into the biggest hits and flops, the breakout successes, and the top and bottom studios

Putting this at number one is not analysis, it is arithmetic. Nothing has ever opened bigger, and only three films have ever grossed more domestically than it already has in under three weeks. What is worth saying is how far outside the normal range every single one of these numbers sits. The record ledger, in order: biggest preview night ever ($72M), biggest opening day ever ($169.8M), biggest opening weekend ever ($360.1M, past Endgame’s $357.1M), biggest PG-13 opening ever, biggest single marketplace weekend ever ($437.1M for all films), and the fastest film in history to $400M (four days), to $500M (seven) and to $800M (nineteen).

The holds are the part that will get argued about for years. The second weekend fell 60% to $144.3M, steep but completely normal off a record that size, and then the third weekend fell only 51% to $70.7M, a better hold than Endgame managed at the same stage and the second-largest third weekend any film has ever posted. It is at $803.9M and still playing, fourth on the all-time domestic chart with weeks of runway left, and our model projects $906.9–981.8M. The floor of that range clears Endgame’s $858.4M for second all-time; the $944.9M midpoint clears The Force Awakens’ $936.7M for the biggest domestic run in history. A billion domestic is out of reach. The all-time domestic crown is not, and $2.04 billion worldwide is already banked. Sony spent $225M and got the biggest release in the history of the company.

The best result of the summer by every measure that isn’t gross. Obsession opened third on May 15 with $17.2M and then did the thing almost no wide release does any more: it got bigger. Weekend two was $24.0M, up 39%. Weekend three was $27.4M, up another 14% and 59% clear of the opening. Weekend four held at $25.4M and weekend five still did $19.0M. Four straight weekends above its own opening, and it was into the second half of June before a single frame came in under the $17.2M it started with. It has finished at $263.5M domestic.

That is a 15.3x multiplier, and it is the biggest in our data on any film that opened above $12M since 2000. Not the biggest for a horror film or the biggest of the year, the biggest full stop: ahead of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish at 15.0x, and half again what Avatar managed at 10.2x. Only five films anywhere in our data have legged harder off an opening that size, and every one of them is from a different era of moviegoing: Titanic at 21.0x, Ghost at 17.9x, Ghostbusters at 16.9x, Home Alone at 16.3x and Beverly Hills Cop at 15.5x. Nothing since Titanic in 1997 has come close, and Obsession did it on a May opening with no holiday corridor and no awards campaign behind it.

The economics are the other half of it. Focus reportedly paid north of $15 million for a film made for $750,000 out of TIFF Midnight and turned it into the biggest domestic and worldwide release in the label’s history, $495.7M globally. Every distributor in town spent this summer trying to work out how to buy the next one.

Putting it above The Odyssey will annoy people, so here is the argument. Both films are historic; only one of them was supposed to be. A Christopher Nolan epic with a $250M budget, an IMAX-exclusive hook and the best reviews of his career grossing $1.30 billion worldwide is a plan executed to the letter, and executing that plan is genuinely hard. Obsession is a $750,000 pickup with no stars that opened third on the deadest weekend of the summer and then out-legged every wide release of the last twenty-six years. Spider-Man is first because scale that size rewrites the all-time chart and nothing else came within a mile of it. Obsession is second because it is the one result here that no amount of money could have bought.

A three-hour R-rated Homer adaptation with a $250 million budget was the summer’s largest bet on the proposition that adults still leave the house for something that isn’t a franchise. The answer came back at $123.5M domestic, $264.1M worldwide in the opening frame, the biggest of Nolan’s career, along with a record $139.6M international debut across 73 territories. It is also the fourth-biggest R-rated opening ever recorded, behind only the three Deadpool films.

It is already past Oppenheimer as the biggest film Nolan has made, at $1.30 billion global, and it is nowhere near done: five weekends in it still took $23.6M, and it hit $500M domestic in 31 days, matching The Super Mario Bros. Movie and a day inside Avatar’s pace. The legs are the tell: a 4.2x multiplier so far on a July release, driven by a format story as much as a review story, with $354M of the worldwide take coming from IMAX screens on the first feature ever shot entirely in the format. It stands at $512.8M domestic today and needs another $20.5M to pass The Dark Knight’s $533.3M for the biggest domestic run of Nolan’s career. That happens inside two weeks. We’re expecting it to finish close to $600M.

For scale on how far past expectations this landed: Nolan’s previous worldwide best was The Dark Knight Rises at $1.08 billion, and Oppenheimer, the film that was supposed to have found the ceiling for a three-hour adult drama, finished at $975.8M off an $82.5M opening. The Odyssey opened 50% larger than that and is out-legging it as well, 4.2x against 4.0x. It is already 25% clear of The Dark Knight Rises globally, and on Wednesday it took the all-time R-rated crown off Deadpool & Wolverine’s $1.338 billion, reaching $1.352 billion worldwide. We have it finishing past $1.6 billion, which would make it the fourteenth film in history to reach that number and the only R-rated one on the list, slotting in between The Lion King’s $1.663B and The Avengers’ $1.519B.

Backrooms did not break A24’s records so much as relocate them. Its $197.5M domestic is more than double Marty Supreme’s $96.0M, the label’s previous best, and Marty Supreme was itself $19M clear of Everything Everywhere All at Once’s $77.2M, so the old top of the A24 chart was already a step above everything under it. Put it the sharpest way: Backrooms’ opening weekend alone, $81.4M, is larger than the entire domestic run of every film A24 has ever released except one. The previous A24 opening-weekend record was Civil War’s $25.5M in 2024. This tripled it. And it is not just a specialty-label record. $81.4M is the fourth-biggest horror opening on record, behind only It ($123.4M), It: Chapter Two ($91.1M) and The Conjuring: Last Rites ($84.0M), all of them studio franchise plays.

All of that from an adaptation of a YouTube series, directed by a 20-year-old making his first feature, on a budget reported under $10 million and co-financed with Chernin. The B– CinemaScore capped the multiplier at 2.4x and kept it out of the $250M conversation, which is the only thing separating this from a top-five summer gross and is completely beside the point at that cost. And all of it landed two weeks into Obsession’s run, which means the two biggest independent-label results in years were playing the same market at the same time.

Call the top two a coin toss on the dollars. Supergirl takes the top spot for what it costs on top of them. Deadline reported a $170–186M net production cost, $120M in global P&A and a DC-record $100M promotional-partner campaign on top of that, putting breakeven around $315 million and the estimated loss near $125 million. Supergirl finished at $72.4M domestic and $126.4M worldwide. It did not clear its marketing budget.

A 58% Tomatometer and a B– CinemaScore off a $37.1M opening was only ever going to leg out at 2.0x, and it did. The bigger problem is the film standing in front of it. Superman opened to $125.0M last summer and finished at $354.2M domestic and $618.7M worldwide. Supergirl opened at 30% of that and finished at 20% of it. The second picture in the rebuilt DC slate kept a fifth of the audience the first one went out and found. Warner Bros. now has to sell the next one on Superman’s numbers and hope nobody looks at these.

Here is the case for putting this first instead. A $170M production cost before a dollar of marketing, against $113.8M worldwide, is 0.67x of negative cost recovered at the global box office, worse than Supergirl’s 0.74x and far worse than Moana’s 1.18x. Every tentpole on this list lost money; this one got back the smallest share of what it spent. On percentages, it is the worst result of the summer.

We called it in our June long-range preview: we used Tron: Ares’ $73M domestic as the realistic finish and baked in a sub-$100M result. It landed at $64.8M. The reception was the surprise: a 73% Tomatometer, a 90% audience score and a B CinemaScore, which is a perfectly well-liked film. It simply had no audience waiting for it, a forty-year-old toy property with no theatrical track record dropped into a June frame where Scary Movie 6 took the top spot and Backrooms was in its second weekend. Amazon MGM made a good version of a movie nobody asked to see, at tentpole cost. That is a harder problem to fix than a bad movie.

What keeps it second rather than first is that the damage is contained. There is no franchise behind it to wound. A toy property that has never worked theatrically either lands on the first attempt or it doesn’t, and Amazon MGM can shelve the idea and never think about it again. The studio was not leaning on it either: Project Hail Mary opened in March, did $344.1M domestic and $684.1M worldwide and handed Amazon MGM the sixth-biggest film of the year before the summer had even started. Supergirl’s loss lands on a slate that has to keep building. This one lands on a slate that can simply stop.

The most expensive film on this list, and the one that turns a bad run into a real question about whether the live-action remake still works in 2026. It is not a dead format, and Lilo & Stitch did $1.038 billion worldwide fifteen months ago. But two of Disney’s last three have now missed badly: Snow White stopped at $87.2M domestic in 2025, and Moana cost $250 million with a reported $145 million of global marketing behind it, opened to $43.1M and has grossed $125.0M domestic and $294.0M worldwide. Deadline put the first-cycle loss at $100–125 million.

The number Burbank should be looking at is on the same property. Moana 2 did $460.4M domestic and $1.059 billion worldwide in November 2024. The live-action version made 27% of that worldwide, twenty months later, from an audience Disney had just finished proving was there. The format still prints money when the property is Lilo & Stitch. The question this result asks is whether it prints money on anything that isn’t already a sure thing.

It ranks third rather than first only because it recovered more of its cost than the two films above it. The reception split hard: 34% on the Tomatometer against a 90% audience score and an A– CinemaScore, which describes a movie the people who saw it liked and almost nobody chose to see. The 2.9x multiplier is actually respectable. The problem was never the hold. It was that the opening came in at less than half of what a $250M budget requires, and there is no version of this that gets to breakeven.

The smallest budget on this list, and it is fourth anyway because almost none of it came back. In the Grey is a Guy Ritchie action thriller with Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal that cost a reported $60 million, opened on 2,018 screens to $2.9 million, and finished at $5.7M. Its worldwide total is also $5.7M, because there is no international line at all. That is roughly ten cents back on the dollar of negative cost, before marketing.

The collapse was immediate and total: -68% in weekend two, then -92% in weekend three, at which point it was on 168 screens. A 47% Tomatometer with an 84% audience score and a B CinemaScore is not a disaster of a movie. It is a movie that no one was ever told about, released into the weakest frame of the entire summer. Every other film on this list at least got its opening weekend. This one never had one.

Sony has the biggest movie of the summer. Universal has the biggest summer, and it is not especially close once you count the way these companies actually book money. Folding in Focus, the group put $1.091 billion of domestic gross into the market from seven releases, more than any other studio group, with four films over $100M domestic and no two of them alike: The Odyssey at $512.8M, Obsession at $263.5M, Minions & Monsters at $180.8M and Disclosure Day at $116.6M. A three-hour Nolan epic, a $750,000 horror pickup, an animated sequel and an Amblin sci-fi thriller. Only One Night Only missed, and it cost $25M.

The underrated part is what the group did on the weekends nobody was watching. Universal won July 3 with Minions & Monsters and June 12 with Disclosure Day, the two softest frames on either side of Toy Story 5, and Focus won a May 15 frame that turned out to be the weakest of the entire summer. And there is a line on the ledger that never shows up in a market-share table: Universal Pictures International handles Michael overseas, which means the $649.1M of international gross on Lionsgate’s first billion-dollar film was moved through Universal’s pipes. Count that and Universal touched more of this summer than anyone.

Sony released three movies this summer and one of them is the biggest opening weekend in the history of the medium. The Spider-Man ledger is above; what it means for Sony is that a single title on a $225M negative accounted for 17.7% of every domestic dollar the market sold this summer and 21.3% of everything the summer sold. On raw scale, no studio had a bigger season.

It is second on this list rather than first because of what sits underneath it, which is nothing. The Breadwinner did $20.2M against a $25M budget and a 28% Tomatometer, and the rest of the slate is rounding error. $803.9M of Sony’s $825.6M, or 97%, is one movie. That is the best possible reason to win a summer and the least repeatable one, and it is worth being blunt about what it hides. Across all of 2026 Sony has released eight films for $1.004 billion domestic. Take Spider-Man out and that is $199.6M from seven releases, with GOAT’s $103.3M the only one of them above $30M.

A studio whose entire year swings on whether a Spider-Man film lands inside it is one slipped release date from a bad one, and Marvel Studios has the character back on screen often enough that Sony cannot count on this cadence. The next tier has to get built. Insidious: Out of the Further arrives Friday and is exactly the kind of release that needs to work: a cheap horror franchise entry that returns its cost several times over. Sony needs four or five of those a year, not one, or the summer it just won becomes the outlier it looks like.

Warner Bros. put four wide films into the summer market, more than Sony or Disney managed, and finished behind A24. Supergirl is the wound: a $37.1M opening, a 2.0x leg to $72.4M domestic and $126.4M worldwide against a $170–186M net production cost, $120M in global P&A and a DC-record $100M promotional-partner campaign, with Deadline putting the first-cycle loss at roughly $125 million against a $315M breakeven. Mortal Kombat II grossed $79.8M domestic on an $80M negative, which is a wash at best.

Evil Dead Burn ($32.2M on $20M) is the one clean win. And The End of Oak Street opened last weekend to $21.0M against a reported net cost of $80–92M, with our model calling $50.2–58.2M domestic. Good reviews on all of it: 86% for Oak Street, 72% for Evil Dead Burn. None of that changes the ledger.

Amazon MGM spent tentpole money twice and got mid-size returns both times. Masters of the Universe cost $170M before marketing and opened to $29.4M on its way to $64.8M domestic and $113.8M worldwide, and the film itself was received fine, with a 73% Tomatometer, a 90% audience score and a B CinemaScore, which is the frustrating part. It is not a movie people rejected; it is a movie nobody showed up for.

The Sheep Detectives is the better story and still not a good one: a 93% Tomatometer, an A– CinemaScore and a terrific 4.4x multiple off a $15.1M opening, which got it to $66.1M domestic and $132.3M worldwide on a $75M budget. Great movie, wrong budget. The studio’s season-saving title, Project Hail Mary, opened in March.