Hollywood Box Office Headed To Best Year Since 2019, But Not Fixed Yet

With a lengthy slate of auteur and blockbuster projects set for 2026, the movies of Hollywood’s media companies likely are headed to a $9.5 billion domestic box office, their best take since before the pandemic.

That’s the good news from new full-year projections by Cinelytic Group, which advises studios on a range of processes related to film script-management, financial projections, production decisions, and marketing.

“This is the strongest slate since COVID,” said Cinelytic co-founder and CEO Tobias Queisser in an interview. “Strong “(intellectual property) films, strong auteur films.”

The 2026 slate includes lots of big films, starting with the third Avatar, released a week before Christmas, and already with $1.23 billion in the bank. It has led the box office every day since the new year started, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com, and faces little real blockbuster competition for many weeks to come. The film likely will come close to its predecessors, which each brought in more than $2 billion.

Christopher Nolan’s take on The Odyssey will be, almost certainly, another Christopher Nolan critical and commercial hit. Also coming this year: another Avengers, another Spider-Man, another Toy Story, another Mario Brothers, more Minions, a live-action Moana, a Mandalorian movie, Supergirl, another Jackass, another Godzilla, another Hunger Games, another Jumanji, another Dune, and another Scream. All promising, and familiar, box-office magnets.

On the auteur side, many are anticipating Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, Maggie Gyllenhall’s The Bride, Lord & Miller’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson bio-pic, Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, and Alejandro Iñarritu’s Digger with Tom Cruise, among others. Basically, there’s a lot coming.

But so is some continuing bad news for the struggling movie business. A mid-$9-billion take is still more than $1.5 billion below the $11-billion-plus levels Hollywood studios routinely harvested each of the five years before the lockdown closed most everything and sent the exhibition business spiraling down.

Domestic box office receipts the last three years have been largely flat, between $8.5 billion and $8.9 billion, so a bump substantially over $9 billion, finally, is a good sign, said Queisser.

But….that doesn’t mean the best box office since the lockdown is actually, uh, good, Queisser said, especially when you look at how many tickets are being sold to generate that money.

“Box office doesn’t tell you the whole story,” Queisser said. “When you look at admissions, it’s a bit gloomier. It’s down 40 percent from 2019.”

Steadily rising ticket prices, from an average a bit over $9 apiece nationwide to more than $11 over that period, have helped mask some of the bigger issues vexing both the studios and the exhibitors, Queisser said.

“The industry really took a dip,” Queisser said. “I don’t foresee that to be recovering really strongly. I think $9 or $10 billion is where the industry will be going forward. I hate that term ‘the new normal,’ but it is unfortunately the new situation.”

On the studio side, the streaming wars are over, which Netflix and YouTube won, and millions of consumers prefer for a big chunk of their movie viewing. Disney bought most of Fox several years ago. Paramount was bought by the far smaller, but richer Skydance. Now Paramount Skydance is trying to pry Warner Bros. Discovery out of an $83 billion sale to Netflix. Consolidation looms well beyond those major steps.

Some exhibitors have shut down, others have gone through bankruptcy, and all want more movies from Hollywood to entice more people into their theaters. Hollywood hasn’t obliged, and likely will be less able or willing to make more theatrical releases as consolidation and risk aversion reduce the number and types of films sent to theaters rather than straight to streaming.

“We would love to have a stronger industry,” Queisser said. “What we definitely see is there is a demand constraint. Not as many people are willing to go to theaters. So much entertainment is out there.”

So how good are Cinelytic’s projections? The company built them up by looking at all those much-anticipated films, projecting likely box office for each one, and combining the result into a grand total. Previous years’ estimates have typically been a little lower then actuals, but routinely within a few percentage points of final totals. So maybe 2026 might even slightly overperform.

Hollywood studios use those projections to decide which scripts to develop, how much to spend to realistically get their investment back, which nearly finished ones need marketing tweaks, and more. But to raise the bottom line on their projects, however many they make, studios better remember one thing, Queisser said: quality matters, especially if people are deciding whether to watch a movie in a theater, or wait several weeks for it to come to streaming.

“A film has to be good, whatever that means,” Queisser said. “In the old days, (studios) got away with a lot more. Now you’ve got a lot of options, You really make an informed choice. You need to be excited to go to the theater, and to enjoy being entertained.”