Spider-Man tops a 2026 box office split evenly on franchises

With four months of the year still to run, the ten highest-grossing films in American cinemas have taken $3.90 billion between them and sold about 326.5 million tickets, according to The Numbers' running tally of calendar-year domestic grosses.

Sony's Spider-Man: Brand New Day leads on $869.3 million from a July 31 release, well clear of Universal's The Odyssey on $547.2 million and Disney's Toy Story 5 on $478.3 million.

Classifying each of those ten films by whether it belongs to an existing film series, USA Times finds that five do and five do not, and that franchise entries account for 55.8% of the top ten's gross rather than the near-monopoly the industry's release strategy assumes. The rule used is deliberately generous to the franchise side: a sequel, prequel, reboot or new entry in an established film series counts as returning, so Spider-Man, Toy Story 5, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Minions & Monsters are all in that column.

The top ten

Rank	Film	Distributor	Released	2026 domestic gross	Tickets sold	Existing film series
1	Spider-Man: Brand New Day	Sony Pictures	Jul 31	$869,309,421	72.7m	Yes
2	The Odyssey	Universal	Jul 17	$547,220,500	45.8m	No
3	Toy Story 5	Walt Disney	Jun 19	$478,303,825	40.0m	Yes
4	The Super Mario Galaxy Movie	Universal	Apr 1	$429,814,610	35.9m	Yes
5	Michael	Lionsgate	Apr 24	$372,303,388	31.1m	No
6	Project Hail Mary	Amazon MGM	Mar 20	$344,050,007	28.8m	No
7	Obsession	Focus Features	May 15	$263,451,715	22.0m	No
8	The Devil Wears Prada 2	20th Century	May 1	$220,556,651	18.4m	Yes
9	Backrooms	A24	May 29	$197,523,512	16.5m	No
10	Minions & Monsters	Universal	Jul 1	$182,362,915	15.2m	Yes

Source: The Numbers, top-grossing domestic movies, calendar-year 2026 gross as of August 28, 2026. Series classification and totals by USA Times.

What the split actually shows

The conventional account of the modern American box office is that only established intellectual property draws an audience to a cinema. This year's chart does not support the strong version of that claim.

The second-biggest film of the year so far is an adaptation of a three-thousand-year-old poem with no prior entry in a film series. The fifth is a biographical drama. The sixth is a science-fiction novel adaptation from a streaming-first distributor releasing theatrically. The ninth is an A24 horror film built from internet folklore, which took $197.5 million.

The pattern in the data is not franchise versus original. It is pre-sold versus unknown, and a story an audience already knows counts as pre-sold whether or not a studio has filmed it before. The Odyssey, Michael and Project Hail Mary each arrived with a public that recognised the material. What is missing from the top ten is not the sequel. It is the film about something nobody had heard of.

That distinction matters commercially because the two categories carry different costs. A studio pays to build franchise awareness once and then amortises it across entries. Adapting a known text or life buys the same recognition without the sequel obligation, and 2026 suggests the market prices those two routes similarly.

Concentration is lower than it looks

The two largest films account for 36.3% of the top ten's gross. That is a meaningful concentration, but it is not the winner-take-all distribution the industry's release calendar implies, and the tail is unusually healthy: the tenth-placed film has taken $182.4 million, which in several recent years would have placed it inside the top six.

The implied average ticket price across all ten films is $11.96, which is the figure The Numbers uses to convert dollars to admissions, so the ticket column tracks the gross column exactly. What it adds is scale in a unit people can hold: 326.5 million admissions for ten films, in a country of about 340 million people.

Universal owns the year

Counted by parent company rather than by label, one studio has had a materially better year than the rest.

Universal released The Odyssey, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and Minions & Monsters under its own name and Obsession through Focus Features, which it owns. That is four of the top ten and $1.42 billion of the $3.90 billion the group has taken, or 36.4% of the total from a single corporate parent.

Disney's position depends on how it is counted. Toy Story 5 is Disney proper and The Devil Wears Prada 2 is 20th Century, which Disney also owns, giving it two of the ten and $698.9 million. Sony has one film and $869.3 million, all of it from Spider-Man, which is the most concentrated position on the chart and the most exposed.

The two entries worth watching are the ones from companies that are not legacy studios at all. Amazon MGM put Project Hail Mary into cinemas rather than straight onto a service and took $344.1 million. A24, which distributes at a fraction of the majors' scale, took $197.5 million with Backrooms. Both results argue that the theatrical route still pays for material that does not need a franchise behind it.

What the rest of the year tests

Three things will show whether the pattern above is real or an artefact of a strong first eight months.

The autumn slate is where original adult drama has historically been released, and its performance will indicate whether the audience for non-franchise material in the summer chart extends past the tentpole season.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened on July 31 and has taken $869.3 million in under a month of release, which means most of its run is still ahead of it. If it clears $1 billion domestically it will restate the franchise case single-handedly, and the 55.8% figure above will move.

The last of it is Avatar: Fire and Ash, which opened in December 2025 and has still added $154.0 million of calendar-2026 gross. A film in its ninth month outgrossing most new releases is a reminder that theatrical windows have stretched, and that a chart taken on August 28 measures a moving object.

Cover photograph: the proscenium and stage of the United Palace, a 1930 movie palace in Washington Heights, Manhattan. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.