美国票房复苏：2026年夏季票房接近疫情前水平

The 2026 summer box office is off to a sizzling start thanks to a powerhouse combination of fan-favorite sequels and low budget originals. The season has only just gotten started, yet US movie theaters have already raked in $1.8 billion, which is less than 2% away from 2019 levels. That's the last normal box office year before the pandemic shuttered movie theaters. The summer box office is an 18-week period, running from the first Friday in May through Labor Day Monday, and accounts for about 40% of the annual domestic box office.

So it's vitally important in terms of what the overall health of the industry looks like and what that portends for the entire year. While the summer typically kicks off with a blockbuster Hollywood action film or superhero team up this year, the season launched with a musical biopic, a fashion dramedy, and a pair of horror films. Michael the Devil Wears Prada two obsession and backrooms have together contributed nearly $850 million to the domestic summer box office since the start of May.

Notably, that's about how much the blockbuster Avengers: Endgame had hauled in by the same point in 2019. Ticket sales this summer have also gotten a boost from the mid-June release of Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5, which posted a franchise best opening of $160 million. Right now, there's about a $30 million difference between the summer of 2026 and the same point in June in 2019. Summer is definitely closing the gap on 2019, which is the pre-pandemic benchmark for the summer season.

And now we have a lot of big movies on the way, and I'm looking forward to perhaps a $4.2 billion summer. And that's good news for an industry that has struggled to return to the box office levels seen pre-pandemic, and continues to chase an elusive $10 billion annual benchmark that hasn't been reached since 2019. You see, that year was one of the best box office years in cinematic history, and at midyear, ticket sales had reached $5.2 billion domestically.

The 2026 box office currently stands at about $4.4 billion, lagging about 15%. And we're going to narrow that gap even more as films like Minions and Monsters, The Odyssey. You know, these huge films that are on the way, and obviously Spider-Man: Brand New Day, that could be the biggest opening weekend of the year, and that opens on July 31st, because that's going to add and contribute a lot of box office to the month of August.

Then that sets up a fall and a holiday period that I think we're not going to see really that much of a slowdown. Momentum is key in the entertainment industry, and movies slated for the back half of the year will likely drive even more people to theaters. This includes the likes of The Hunger Games: Sunrise on The Reaping, Avengers: Doomsday, Dune Part Three, and Jumanji: Open World. Now that we're on the cusp of what could be the first $10 billion year since 2020 is a testament to how important the moviegoing experience is to people.

We're hoping that Hollywood can crack the code on how to keep that going, keep that momentum, keep that revenue stream going, and most importantly, keep that generational movie going in top form and keep it moving forward.