Hollywood’s Brand New Day?

Look, the numbers are great. Perhaps even incredible given where the box office has been in the last few years post-pandemic. But what they aren’t are actual records. At least if we’re being honest with ourselves.

A powerful one-two punch from “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” and “The Odyssey” has fueled the biggest collective weekend in box office history, with roughly $430 million across all movies in the marketplace.

Prior to this, the top three weekends were led by 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame” ($402 million collectively), 2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War” ($314 million collectively) and 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” ($313 million collectively). It’s a particularly exciting benchmark for the recently married Tom Holland and Zendaya, who star in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” and “The Odyssey.”

I personally find it odd that these headlines keep coming unabated despite the fact that perhaps the only topic on which more ink has been spilled in the past few years than the death of the movie theater has been on the concept of inflation. Because of the way that money and time work, this is simply not a real comparison. It’s not exactly apples-to-oranges, but it’s certainly not dollars-to-dollars!

I harp on this a lot, and have for years, but I feel the need to dumb it down even further to make it clear:

Yes, $430M is more than $402M in 2026. But the problem is that only the $430M number is from 2026. The $402M number is from 2019. Thanks to said inflation, $402M earned in 2019 is actually closer to $525M in 2026 if you simply adjust using the consumer pricing index numbers. The reality is slightly more nuanced because movie ticket prices don’t track exactly to this number, and actually overall inflation has caused the CPI to rise faster than ticket prices. Still, the 2019 number is almost certainly closer to $500M when adjusting for 2026 movie ticket prices.

$525M – or even just $500M – is still more than $430M. So what we’re really celebrating here is that things are more expensive with time. That includes milk. That includes movie tickets. Congrats, everyone.

“We have conquered a box-office milestone that seemed forever out of reach,” says Paul Dergarabedian, Rentrak’s head of marketplace trends. “This is now only the second $400 million-plus weekend in box office history.”

$400M today is likely to look something more like $750M – $800M in 2050, so one imagines we won’t be touting such “forever out of reach” numbers by then. Calm down, dude.

You know what other metric is at or near a record? The number of theaters that movies are opening in. When Batman set a record opening in 1989, it did so in just under 2,200 locations. Brand New Day just opened in 4,487,¹ just shy of Top Gun: Maverick’s 2022 record of 4,735 locations.

Look, again, it was a great weekend! But I don’t see the point of not putting it into the actual, appropriate context. I mean, I certainly do if you’re Hollywood! And I guess I do if you’re a Hollywood trade publication. (Though, to be fair, another article about the weekend not fully centered around the “record” does caveat that the numbers are not inflation-adjusted.) Still, readers outside of the industry might want at least a dose of reality in such reporting.

The 2018 $314M weekend number adjusted with CPI ends up being about $418M, so this new “record” weekend would hold there, just barely. However the 2015 $313M weekend translates to $441M in 2026 money, so the “record” again falls there, just barely. But don’t you think it’s curious how every record weekend before this one occurred in a four year span from 2015 to 2019? Again, that’s inflation!

The actual box office records for individual movies illustrates this point well. Gone with the Wind, which was released in 1939, remains the all-time leader at $1.85B. Second is Star Wars (aka A New Hope – the first of the first trilogy), released in 1977 at $1.63B. The Sound of Music, released in 1965 is third at $1.3B. In fact, to find a movie released after 2000, you have to go down to #11, The Force Awakens, the first of the third Star Wars trilogies which yes, powered the 2015 weekend mentioned above.

And wait a minute, it’s sort of buried by Box Office Mojo, but those adjusted numbers are only updated for 2019 ticket prices! Updated to 2026 prices, $1.85B becomes… $2.4B for Gone with the Wind! Star Wars’ 2019 figure would look more like $2.13B now. The Sound of Music would be at $1.7B today. That’s just domestic.

In that regard, for context, the biggest movie released all of last year was either Zootopia 2 or The Minecraft Movie (depending on if you only include 2025 domestic box office), both around $430M. This year’s crop will for sure finish far higher, but let’s just say it’s this new Spider-Man, and let’s try to extrapolate out to say that it might end up in the $800M – $900M range (which may be generous as it probably won’t have the holding power of The Odyssey from a much higher starting point). That could come close to the current all-time box office champ when not accounting for inflation: the aforementioned The Force Awakens at $937M.

But wait, actually, that Force Awakens number would be more like $1.3B in 2026 dollars. There’s that pesky inflation again!

The only movie on that non-adjusted all-time list released before 2000 is 1997’s Titanic at #9. Beyond that, there’s only one other movie released in the 90s – 1999’s The Phantom Menace, the first of the second trilogy – at #23. To find a movie not released in the past 30 years, you have to go to #28 where, yes, the first Star Wars again resides (after a few re-releases). To finally find a non-Star Wars movie to make the cut, you have to go to #34 with 1982’s E.T (also after several re-releases).

Again, all of this is just meant to illustrate the roll inflation and ticket prices play in these numbers. We’re celebrating an all-time weekend, but that’s simply because money’s value is also at an all-time high. If we wanted a more honest measurement, we’d use tickets sold or even something like per-capita filmgoing. But Hollywood would prefer we don’t look at those numbers, for obvious reasons.

At the end of the day, I suppose the most important thing is unlike many of its high-grossing brethren, Spider-Man: Brand New Day will actually turn a profit at the box office. In fact, it undoubtedly already has! Ditto with The Odyssey and several other movies this year, thus far. That’s great! And certainly better than years past. But it’s also undoubtedly not that great when compared to the type of profit margins that the actual highest grossing movies of all time used to pull.

For those margins and profits, we probably have to turn to the talent streaming in from YouTube…

One more thing: sure, let’s call this a new hope or a brand new day. And movie theaters and Hollywood will take whatever wins they can get. But just to keep the wet blanket wrapped around the narrative for a moment, I’ll note that despite the shocked euphoria that Hollywood now seems to be expressing over these numbers, this was entirely predictable. In fact, it was one of my predictions for 2026! But it came with a warning:

A box office boom, but… – Spider-Man, Avengers, Hunger Games, Jumanji, Toy Story, Shrek, Mandalorian (and Grogu), Mario, Minions, Moana, Michael Jackson, Narnia, Odyssey, Dune, Steven Spielberg back with aliens – even if all of them don’t hit (Supergirl?), enough of them will to boost the box office results for 2026, perhaps even past the pre-pandemic levels finally (not counting for inflation, because Hollywood ridiculously never seems to…). Everyone will trumpet the return of movie theaters, and yet it won’t change any of the longer-term trends and issues with the industry. Of course, we won’t be able to see that fully until 2027 and beyond…

Yeah… (Also, nailed it with the Supergirl sub-prediction there!)