Hollywood’s summer movie season enters its final week with a legitimate shot at rewriting the record books.
“This has been such a spectacular moviegoing season that the numbers are just that, and the incredible mix of films presented to audiences this year has been a game changer,” Paul Dergarabedian, Comscore’s senior media analyst, told Deadline.
Domestic ticket sales for the season have climbed to $4.598 billion since May, according to Deadline’s box office analysis, leaving Hollywood just $158 million short of the $4.756 billion set in 2013 — the all-time high-water mark for a single summer.
That gap probably won’t close. Industry trackers project the season will finish $18 million to $22 million shy of the 2013 record once Labor Day closes the books on Sept. 7. Finishing as the second-best summer on record is still a remarkable turnaround for an industry that spent years wondering whether theatrical moviegoing would ever fully recover.
The summer surge is part of a bigger rebound. The full 2026 domestic box office crossed $7 billion by late August, a 20% jump over the same point in 2025, even though the year is still running about 7% behind pre-pandemic 2019 pace. With DUNE: PART THREE and AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY still ahead this fall and winter, 2026 is shaping up as the year theatrical moviegoing finally climbed most of the way back.
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This past weekend supplied a big chunk of that momentum, pulling in roughly $100 million domestically, 46% ahead of the same weekend a year ago. SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY held its now-familiar spot at No. 1 for a fifth straight weekend with $22.2 million, pushing its domestic haul toward $900 million. COYOTE VS. ACME, the Warner Bros. Animation picture that spent nearly three years shelved as a tax write-off before Ketchup Entertainment rescued it, opened to $15.4 million.
THE ODYSSEY has quietly turned into one of the summer’s biggest stories in its own right. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation has grossed $563.8 million domestically since opening in July, proof that a three-hour epic built on Homer rather than a comic book can still fill theaters.
Movieguide® has followed each of these movies well before their box office numbers made headlines. The site’s review of SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY awarded the sequel four out of four stars for a story that casts Peter Parker as a Christ-like figure willing to sacrifice everything for someone else, while flagging nearly 40 obscenities — several using Jesus’s name — that earned it an Extreme Caution rating.
COYOTE VS. ACME received similar treatment, picking up three out of four stars for its themes of perseverance and friendship, alongside cautions about cartoon slapstick violence and language.
THE ODYSSEY landed in the same territory. Movieguide®’s review praised a marriage “worth crossing 10 years of ocean for” and Penelope’s steadfast faithfulness during Odysseus’s decade away, even as pagan imagery, occult content and violence pushed the movie’s own rating to Extreme Caution.
None of that discernment shows up on a box office chart. The record chase says something true about this year in movies — audiences turned out in numbers Hollywood hasn’t seen in over a decade — but it says nothing about what they found once the lights went down. That’s the number Movieguide® keeps tracking long after Labor Day closes the books on 2026.
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