Summer Box Office Hits $4.5B, But Ticket Sales Still Lag 2019
Hollywood is set for its best summer in years by dollar totals, yet fewer screens, fewer movies and fewer moviegoers tell a more complicated story.
Hollywood's summer box office is on track to hit roughly $4.5 billion in North America, topping the 2023 "Barbenheimer" summer and the 2019 Lion King/Avengers: Endgame season, according to industry trade estimates cited by NPR.
Hits including Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, the Michael Jackson biopic Michael, The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Toy Story 5 drove the surge. Two low-budget thrillers originating from YouTube creators, Obsession and Backrooms, together added $460 million to the North American total. Five 2026 releases — Spider-Man: Brand New Day, The Odyssey, Toy Story 5, Michael and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie — have each topped $1 billion worldwide, more than in any year since the pandemic began.
But the recovery comes with caveats. According to research firm Omdia, North America had 44,283 movie screens at the end of 2019; by the end of last year, more than 7,000 had permanently closed.
Attendance is also down sharply. S&P Global reports cinemas sold 795.9 million tickets through mid-August in the year before the pandemic. This year's total for the same period is 547.1 million — a drop of nearly a quarter of a billion admissions, even though it's an improvement over the past couple of years.
Higher prices have offset the shortfall. Cinema United found the average ticket cost around $9 seven years ago; research firm EntTelligence now puts the average adult ticket above $13, with premium formats like IMAX averaging $18.46 and standard tickets $12.87.
There are also fewer films to choose from. About 400 movies played in theaters during the summer of 2019; this year, barely 300 will. That means individual films are performing better on average, but audiences have fewer options to bring them back for repeat visits.
Studios and theater owners are still weighing whether the current model — bigger event films, higher prices, fewer screens — is sustainable long-term. For now, though, the industry is celebrating records including the highest collective weekend take in Hollywood history, set when Spider-Man: Brand New Day joined The Odyssey and Toy Story 5 in theaters.
A blockbuster December is expected to add to the tally, with Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday both opening Dec. 18 in what fans are already calling "DunesDay."
This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI), in accordance with our editorial policy.
