Life imitates art, and, as has been the plot for a few movies now, these toys aren’t ready for the trash heap just yet.
In its weekend debut, Disney Pixar’s Toy Story 5 netted $160 million in domestic ticket sales. That’s the best opening of the year and continues an industry-wide hot streak on par with pre-pandemic levels. But is Hollywood really on track to go to infinity and beyond?
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The domestic box office has pulled in nearly $4.5 billion so far this year, the highest for the period since 2019, according to Rentrak data. Industry executives expect the year’s total to exceed $10 billion for the first time since catching a bad case of long COVID; so far, it hasn’t hit $9 billion in annual sales this decade.
Success in 2026, however, looks much different than success in the 2010s, when mega-franchises ruled. This year’s hits have been a little smaller but much more frequent, with seemingly a debut each week catering to a different audience. Kids and families turned out for the aforementioned Toy Story 5 and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie; older audiences returned to theaters for Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day; nostalgic millennials showed up for The Devil Wears Prada 2; and Gen Z turned low-budget indie horror flicks Obsession and Backrooms into sleeper sensations.
Whether Hollywood will continue to win the numbers game remains an open question:
- On one hand, traditional streamers are now embracing the power of the box office; Amazon MGM Studios has committed to releasing more than a dozen movies a year, and scored a $680 million gross earlier this year with Project Hail Mary. Netflix is planning IMAX runs for its upcoming Brad Pitt-led The Adventures of Cliff Booth and a Narnia adaptation from Barbie director Greta Gerwig.
- Consolidation might take its toll, though. While David Ellison has promised 30 theatrical releases a year from a combined Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery, the recent history of Disney’s 20th Century Fox acquisition shows output tends to slow post-mega-mergers.
Tech Story: Either way, Hollywood’s techy California co-residents are taking notice. Google made a $75 million investment Monday in A24, the studio behind Backrooms and HBO’s Euphoria, with plans to create new AI tools for movie production and distribution, according to The Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, Amazon MGM has confirmed abandoning plans to distribute Artificial, a nearly finished movie dramatizing, in presumably not-so-nice a fashion, Sam Altman’s firing and rehiring at OpenAI; Amazon invested $50 billion in OpenAI earlier this year.
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