After a week off from the Box Office Report, there’s still very little new to report. Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey are still firmly, months later, still in the top three. There’s very little ‘magic’ to write about when this happens, but at least this week we’ll have a new number one to look at, even though it feels as though that movie kind of underperformed despite its opening rank. Today’s edition will have more focus on things such as inflation than it does the actual movies at hand, because yall have read more than enough about the Holland summer blockbusters.
Photo credit: WB.
“That’s magic,” says the AMC bumper with the star of Practical Magic! What wasn’t quite magical was the opening weekend for Practical Magic 2, bringing back its trio of Academy Award winning actresses Nicole Kidman, Sandra Bullock, and Diane Wiest. Variety reported that adjusted with inflation, its $30M domestic is in line with the original, which was considered a bomb at the box office. We’ll go into, later in this article, why ‘adjusting for inflation’ is not a way to measure box office. But for now, let’s assess the movie for what it is.
This’ll need around $190M to breakeven, and opening at less than $50M globally is less than ideal for Warner Bros. This always seemed to be an odd choice for a remake considering the reputation of the original, which on the same budget, made less than $100M globally. But it does have decades of cable and streaming giving it a bit of cult appeal, and with the recent sucesses of legacy sequels and female-driven films, one could imagine why somebody would be bullish on a follow-up. However, this underperformed its tracking massively, garnering a global total that had been tracking to be its domestic total opening. Its 3.6 Letterboxd score shows a much better response than its B+ CinemaScore, noting that this may also be a cult classic in the making as it tracks better with cinephiles than it does general audiences, regardless, it doesn’t give much hope for a third installment.
But in a box office environment that only had five films make at least $4M this weekend, and two of them being movies that have been out for at least 45 days, and one of them being Runner, an Angel Studios offering, it’s hard to give much, if any new anlysis on the box office. The good news? One is Coyote vs. Acme, and it’s starting to seem as though it may make the breakeven point for Ketchup’s pricetag that we broke down in the previous Box Office Report here.
The main story this week is on the back of The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Spider-Man is now at an estimated $935M from just domestic gross, meaning it is within $2M of The Force Awakens for the highest-grossing film in the history of the domestic box office. Furthermore, The Odyssey is now at $1.684B, meaning having already cruised passed the highest-grossing R-rated film ever, it’s become the highest-grossing film in the history of Universal Pictures. It did so by making at least $600M domestic.
With these two monstrouos performances, the breakout hits that were Obsession and Backrooms, as well as other billion-dollar grossers such as Toy Story 5 and Michael, this summer became the highest-grossing summer in the history of the domestic box office. Not since COVID, not of this century, but ever.
There was a comment on the DSR post reporting The Odyssey becoming the highest-grossing film in Universal history where a well-intentioned fan reminded people that adjusted for inflation, it isn’t. While there are certain fiscal numbers that do adjust for inflation, notably Real GDP vs. Nominal GDP, this isn’t a conversation that happens online for other industry sectors. It’s sort of a bad faith argument to justify a film somebody wanted to do well underperforming or a film they didn’t want to do well overperforming. In the next part of the Box Office Report, we will explain why these are valid records for The Odyssey, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and the summer box office.
The way we watch television has changed. Adjust for inflation or go by pure ticket admissions, the highest-grossing film of all-time is 1939’s Gone with the Wind. We love Clark Gable at the DSR BOR, in fact, It Happened One Night is one of my favorite movies of all-time. But this box office ‘record?’ Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. Gone with the Wind was in theatres for over four years, and was in theatres during a time where televisions weren’t in homes for anybody other than a few hundred wealthy socialiates in Manhattan. To compare any movie after would be taking away the opportunity it would have had to make those amounts of admissions, and that’s before you focus on the re-releases that happened every few years until home video took off. Jurassic World held Universal’s record, but did so with a theatrical window that had more than doubled the amount of days it took The Odyssey to break its record. Most films nowawadays are lucky to have four weeks in theatres, with most smaller films getting two weeks before it goes to PVOD. The uber-successful films generally get around 45 days. The average theatrical window in 2015 was 110 days. In the summer of 2015, Netflix and Hulu were the only two major streamers, and Netflix led the pack at 65,000,000 subscribers. Netflix currently operates in more than 325,000,000 households, and every major studio has a streaming service. This is also not factoring in the massive dip during the COVID-19 pandemic, a pandemic that conditioned the audiences to wait to watch films at home, and ultimately shortened the theatrical windows. All of this to say: much like home video before it, and the rise of television before that, the rise of streaming has completely altered how society consumes films and it’s exceedingly difficult to convince people to go to the cinema, making the demand far more impressive in 2026.
The Odyssey is an R-rated film. You cannot compare an R-rated film with any other rating, and there’s a reason only three films have ever made $1B. We explain this in more detail in this edition of the Box Office Report, but the general crux of the argument is that the R capitulates its own box office because it limits the amount of youth, a high-spending demographic, that can purchase tickets for the film.
It assumes all markets can be adjusted by inflation. The studios make a deal with each different international market as to what the dollar value they use for the exchange rate is before each movie so that any major economical shift during its theatrical window doesn’t completely change the financials of the film. This makes it near-impossible to approximate what the global inflation would otherwise be.
Competition has changed. Not only are there more films in theatres, because of streaming, there are more television shows. It’s also not just the new films or television shows vying for your attention, but every film and television show ever made is available to us at the click of a button on our smartphones, which have access to YouTube, Instagram Reels, TikTok, and apps. We haven’t even discussed the advent of video games! There are so many things that are so much more accessible than back in the day that are commanding your attention that everything has become more niche simply by nature of the amount of things that exist, making it impossible to pretend that any and all entertainment from other eras exist in a vacuum. ‘Adjust the box office for inflation’ is the equivalent of Eric Bischoff going on his podcast and justifying running a company out of business by using the Monday primetime TNT ratings from 1996 and comparing them to a financial viable company’s ratings on TNT Saturday’s night block in 2026. It’s a ridiculous argument that doesn’t account for the changes in the media landscape. These investments aren’t just time, either, as streaming costs money, video games cost money, and in an era where things are more expensive than ever, disposable income is just as much a commodity you part with for entertainment as your dollar.
There’s an innate understanding of the argument that if a movie that came out back then, with the more limited theatrical window, the rise of streaming, the change of social idealogy, the change in economic condition, the advancements in the storytelling realm that would make something more derivative than it had been its time, among a variety of other factors working against these films that they would sell the same amount of tickets just at a higher fiscal value. That’s simply not the case. A great argument could be made about Man of Steel and James Gunn’s Superman, which performed evenly at the box office, give or a take a million in either direction. However, Man of Steel had more days in theatres, came out in a time where the superhero genre had much stronger box office pull, wasn’t coming off of the large number of failures that the DCEU under AT&T had suffered, didn’t have people who were conditioned to say ‘it’s Warner Bros, it’ll be on HBO in a month,’ amongst a plethora of other factors that work in the favor of Man of Steel. It makes sense that Man of Steel sold more tickets logistically, and it’s doubtful it would do so in the current environment, and that’s coming from somebody who likes that movie. The year before Man of Steel came out, DC’s big movie was the final in the Nolan Dark Knight trilogy. Superman was coming off the slew of Joker: Folie a Deux, The Flash, Blue Beetle, the Shazam films, and Black Adam.
There are more reasons, but if you’ve ever wondered why the Box Office Report does not adjust inflation, and nobody at DSR ever will, at least as long as I’m editor, that’s a layman’s version of why. You cannot pretend that these movies would make the same amount of ticket sales as they otherwise would have in the current market, and there’s no point in discrediting every record you see that doesn’t fit your narrative by going ‘oh yeah, inflation.’ Movies find their cultural footprint not in the time they’re in, but because they’re a representative of the time that they’re in, and that’s ultimately what drives their performance. This is why certain movies, such as even beloved films like Fight Club or The Shawshank Redemption are called ‘ahead of their time,’ because the time that they ended up garnering their cult status was representative of the attitude that the movies brought to the table. If a film like The Sound of Music came out today, which adjusted for inflation would have been at over $2B, it’s not sniffing a sixth of that. Not because it’s a bad movie, the hills are alive at DSR, we’re big Julie Andrews fans. But because that film came out in an era where musicals were representative of the emotional state of the time period, and thus were all the rage. Musicals put a smile on the characters faces and forced more ‘appropriate’ emotions throughout a society that tore them to shreds emotionally, being forced to fake happiness in an era of major disillusionment. Every successful musical, even modern musicals like Dreamgirls and La La Land which are very in-your-face about how tragic their stories are, attempt to put a spin on what’s ultimately a story of characters that are going through it. Post-war societal feel is very famously a juxtaposition of happiness that the war is over, but ultimately a collective trauma from the two World Wars. That is why Sound of Music was a big hit in its time because it was a musical set during the period of the war that nailed its contemporary state of disillusionment from the theatre-going public. Movies make money in their own time, and to assume that they would sell the same volume of tickets before you even include the actual factors working against movies that they didn’t have in other eras, is a ridiculous notion.
Looking ahead at next week, we have one of the most fascinating films to follow. Zach Cregger, coming off of a smash hit in Weapons, is releasing Resident Evil. Despite the lackluster appeal of the previous attempts to turn this into a franchise, Cregger has people excited, and it’s tracking at a $120M global opening on the conservative end of estimates. At an $80M budget, this should easily be profitable. We will explore its actual opening in the next Box Office Report.
Jameus Mooney is an entertainment writer for Comicbook Clique, having covered the entertainment industry for years. You can follow him on Twitter here, and Letterboxd here. You can also listen to his horror podcast, The 2:17 Horror Podcast, at the DeathArts XIII YouTube channel.