What a difference a year makes for the summer box office, as Hollywood remembers that less can be more.
Around this time last year, studios and theater owners found themselves in spin mode. The first half of 2025 showed promise, with the popcorn-tossing success of April’s A Minecraft Movie being followed closely by Lilo & Stitch and the latest Mission: Impossible driving a record-setting Memorial Day weekend. But those warm months turned chilly, and massive tentpoles like Superman and Jurassic World Rebirth weren’t enough to keep the season from sputtering to its $3.67 billion sum, well shy of theater owners’ desired $4 billion mark. To add painful perspective, this put the summer flat with that of 2024, the strike-impacted year so bleak it spurred the “Survive Till ’25” mantra.
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Then the comeback began in earnest. Major studio executives, in talks with The Hollywood Reporter this summer, are expressing newfound positivity — and not just about the numbers themselves (up 21 percent overall year-over-year). Execs seem more aware than ever that any project, regardless of budget, can capture attention — not just the ones with the highest price tag.
Cut to this September, and Hollywood brows are less sweaty, recent Los Angeles heat wave notwithstanding. The summer delivered $4.6 billion through the last weekend in August, marking an increase of 25 percent over last summer.
Beyond sheer grosses, adding to the sense of relief was the notion that movies from all budget levels were part of the success. Peppered amid the challenges for 2025 were glimmers of hope through successes like Weapons ($270 million globally on a $38 million budget), while modestly budgeted reboots Freakier Friday and Final Destination Bloodlines also turned profits. But that summer’s coffers saw a heavy reliance on franchises: DC’s revamped superhero universe, Disney’s live-action remakes, the 30-year-plus dinosaur saga and so on.
Of course, plenty of headlines about the summer of 2026, particularly the latter half, highlighted the success of titles carrying $225-million-plus budgets. Sony and Marvel Studios’ Spider-Man: Brand New Day marked a stunning triumph, setting records left and right on its way to becoming the second-highest-grossing movie ever domestically and, as of this week, swinging past Avatar: The Way of Water for No. 3 on the global chart. Universal’s The Odyssey became Christopher Nolan’s highest-grossing title and the biggest R-rated success ever, while Toy Story 5 stands as the top-performing entry in the Pixar franchise.
But unlike in years past, these wins don’t tell the whole story. Undoubtedly, rival studios would love to use a One Wish Willow to give themselves a breakout like Focus Features’ Obsession, as its success became arguably the season’s biggest conversation starter. The movie’s path is now one of Hollywood legend: Curry Barker’s $750,000-budgeted horror film exploded as a word-of-mouth sensation after Focus snatched it up from TIFF’s Midnight Madness, with the project surpassing $500 million worldwide after its May 15 release. Barker scored an eight-figure deal for his next feature, breakout star Inde Navarrette joined the X-Men and the industry was left wondering when this could ever happen again.
As it turned out, it did happen again — two weeks later. Sorta. Kane Parsons, just 20 years old when he adapted his YouTube series for the A24 movie Backrooms, delivered a paranoid horror film that notched nearly $400 million on a $10 million budget. Suddenly, execs were seeing solutions for how to excite the younger audiences who have come to seek entertainment options from content creators rather than cinemas.
Indeed, the previous template for summer movie success — massive budget for IP that the whole world has heard of, traditional marketing and then cross your fingers — felt stale and misguided at times. It didn’t help that multiple June releases following this playbook, including Masters of the Universe, Supergirl and the live-action Moana, all lost money and failed to ignite the zeitgeist. (In an interesting wrinkle, Mattel’s Masters of the Universe, which grossed $113 million globally on a $170 million budget, has become a big streaming title when it hit the home.) Previous summers had seen shoestring-budgeted outliers — think 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, 2004’s Napoleon Dynamite and 2007’s Paranormal Activity — but this year’s successes reflected a steady appetite for freshness, rather than feeling like one-off palate cleansers.
“Big-budget movies built around known IP and franchises, and backed by huge marketing campaigns, have traditionally been the types of films that draw summer audiences,” says Rentrak’s Paul Dergarabedian. “But in 2026, moviegoers made their choices clear by showing up at movie theaters for an incredibly eclectic mix of films. The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day used their epic scope to deliver the kind of summer popcorn-movie experience we’ve come to expect, while at the same time, micro-budget films like Backrooms and Obsession threw out the rulebook and disrupted the traditional paradigm for summer success in a transformative way.”
This new path comes at a time when studios are wary of breaking the bank on original or non-tentpole concepts but still covet an increase in product. To assuage fears about Paramount Skydance’s planned $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, David Ellison has vowed that both studios will release 30 combined theatrical features each year. This would represent a significant uptick for both, given that Paramount delivered eight big-screen titles in 2025, while Warner Bros. had 11.
There is debate over the idea of added releases and whether they will feel like dump-offs, but this summer suggests potential. Paramount released the Miramax-produced Scary Movie in June, and the sixth title in the Wayans brothers’ spoof franchise bucked theatrical comedy trends with a $231 million global cume on its $30 million budget. Also following the mold of extending long-running franchises on the cheap were Paramount’s Jackass: Best and Last, managing a profit on a $10 budget despite plenty of recycled clips, and the $18 million-budgeted Insidious: Out of the Further, with the horror series’ sixth title not needing star power to scare up $110 million globally for Sony.
Finding the innovative ideas that Gen Z appears to crave is the trickier part. Studios have shifted priorities, with recently launched specialty labels like Warner Bros. Clockwork and Paramount Primal emphasizing edgier fare. And in the “same but different” mindset for which Hollywood is known, all eyes have turned to YouTube creators, as viral shorts and series become the new IP. Evidently, the industry is finally realizing its mistake in allowing its gatekeeping to shun projects like YouTube stalwart Markiplier’s Iron Lung, the self-distributed horror film with a $3 million budget that stunned Hollywood when it came out of nowhere to gross $51 million earlier this year.
“We don’t want to assume that now everything that hits some view count means that it’s [the next Obsession],” Focus chairman Peter Kujawski recently told Letterboxd about how to learn the right lessons from the summer. “Even some existing films that are a delight to watch at a film festival, often they struggle in the world of a commercial movie theater.”
But for now, hope springs eternal that movies of all sizes and origins continue filling seats in even the months with the highest box office expectation. As Sony film chief Tom Rothman told THR, “All the geniuses who said that theatrical movies were dead, they’re not necessarily right. The marketplace is booming right now, and I’m very optimistic.”
This story appeared in the Sept. 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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