With Project Hail Mary and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie dominating the box office year-to-date, the 2026 box office has seen a recent projection of $34.7B by years end. This would be the highest box office since the pandemic, though the narrative that ‘the box office hasn’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels’ is a bit misguided due to the fact that 2019 had the highest box office of any year in history by a significant margin, inflating what ‘pre-pandemic levels’ even are.
Regardless, an excellent start to the 2026 only continued this week with the massive opening for Michael, which overperformed expectations and narrowly missed being the third film to gross $100M domestic in its opening weekend so far this year, though next week’s release of The Devil Wears Prada 2 which features the return of Emily Blunt, Meryl Streep, and Anne Hathaway, should give us the third. This week’s box office saw multiple new releases, but also some strong holdovers.
Michael was projected around $75M domestic, with an even domestic/global split gross, and landed at $97M domestic and $217M international, despite critics saying that it’s bad, it’s bad, it’s really really bad. Antoine Fuqua seems to have made yet another crowdpleaser, and audiences won’t stop ‘til they get enough of the King of Pop. Box office projections aren’t always Black or White, even if it’s Human Nature to think so. This should leg out despite its questionable Rotten Tomatoes score, and maybe even blow past the Lionsgate projection of $700M worldwide. Lionsgate needed the win, even if the budget ballooned in production, and should leg out a profit for the studio. The opening weekend breakdowns are fascinating, because there’s a massive PLF-desire for this film, with 32% coming in a premium large format (IMAX, Dolby Cinema, RPX, 4DX, ScreenX, et. al.), more than a third of its opening weekend admissions. The message from filmgoers here is clear: they want the Michael Jackson experience with the loudest speakers possible. You can blame its overperformance on the boogie. This is the highest domestic debut for a music biopic of all-time, breaking the record set by Straight Outta Compton, the 2015 film focusing on the N.W.A.
Coming in at number two on the domestic box office is the Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which had surrendered a decent chunk of its PLF screens back to Project Hail Mary last week, and the rest of them this weekend to Michael. It saw an approximated 42% fourth weekend drop domestically, still a decent hold, and has now reached $800M worldwide. While a billion is still possible, it’s unlikely to match the $1.4B set by the first one in the summer of 2023. Ultimately hurting the box office returns for Mario this most isn’t even the box office itself, but the fact that it will be hitting PVOD on the fifth, only a month after its initial release. This goes against NBC’s recent CinemaCon edict of 45-day windows, but that doesn’t officially start until 2027. Regardless, a release racing to $800M woldwide quickly would benefit from extending the windows, even if NBC is set to see more money from a video rental at this point than the box office percentages. Double dipping this quickly still seems to be leaving money on the table considering the box office isn’t exactly slow at the moment for the picture.
One film that isn’t hitting PVOD soon, because the studio extended its exclusivity, is the #3 film at the domestic box office for the week: Project Hail Mary. It’s time go for the film to hit $600M, as an amaze amaze amaze hold for the sixth weekend to pass $300M domestic and $600M worldwide, putting the large space epic firmly into profitable territory, a much-needed win for Amazon MGM amidst their commitment to theatrical, following the atrocious bombs earlier this year from Mercy, the Chris Pratt AI crime-vehicle, and Crime 101 with Chris Hemsworth. Their next release, The Sheep Detectives coming out on May 8th also doesn’t look promising. But for Project Hail Mary to hit as big as it has, it could become the biggest non-Star Wars space film in its initial run at the box office ever. Nolan’s Interstellar made $681M in its initial box office run, while the other Andy Wier adaptation, The Martian, made $630M. Hail Mary will likely pass The Martian, but may struggle to beat Interstellar.
Coming in fourth in its second weekend, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy also lost its share of PLF screens to Michael. It saw a near 60% drop, which with how it underperformed opening weekend, isn’t exactly the strongest indicator of a successful film or decent word-of-the-mouth. The film is expertly made, and Lee Cronin’s technical prowess is on display, but weak slate of performances within the film seem to have held it back for the general audience, as well as its desire to be something other than a mummy movie, at times feeling more like an Evil Dead or Exorcist movie. It is unlikely to make its budget back before hitting HBO, continuing the 2026 trend of Warner Bros underperformance alongside Wuthering Heights (which did eek out a profit) and The Bride. This comes after Warner Bros had one of the strongest years in studio history at the box office in 2025.
In fifth, The Drama is threatening $45M domestic on just a $28M budget. While we don’t know how much A24 sold the rights for, films like Marty Supreme and The Smashing Machine sold between $20-$30M. With two budding stars in Robert Pattinson and Zendaya, it seems likely it wasn’t exactly an affordable international purchase. This should put The Drama clearly in profitable territory for A24, but seeing as it’s now past $100M worldwide, for its many partners across different territories. This performance is exceptional when factoring in its marketing is entirely driven by a newspaper clipping of the characters and online murmurs of what its twist is, and if somebody interested in seeing it still hasn’t been told what the twist is, it’s best to go in blind. But don’t expect a rom-com as much of a character study on morality and judgement amongst friends.
Rounding out the top ten:
6. PIXAR’s Hoppers: There’s not much to really add here. It made just under $2M domestic, but is in clear profitability territory for a PIXAR original, with a bit of a return to an older PIXAR story model: a worldview lesson told in ways children can understand. Its box office has seen diminishing returns since the release of Mario, however, as it attempts to fight for the family demo.
7. You, Me, and Tuscany: This saw a 60% drop in its third weekend, making just $1.5M, a seemingly frontloaded debut. It will just clear its budget and probably not be profitable, but with $17M of its ~$20M or so box office being domestic, that does help the financials quite a bit.
8. Over Your Dead Body: The career resurgence for How I Met Your Mother star Jason Segel, who is currently doing career-best work opposite Harrison Ford in the AppleTV+ hit Shrinking, didn’t aid the box office for Over Your Dead Body. Opposite Ready or Not’s Samara Weaving, Over Your Dead Body follows a couple who goes on a recluse vacation with both plotting the murder of the other. This wasn’t expected to light the box office on fire, and IFC tends to give their films a two-week theatrical exhibition not to make a profit theatrically, but to raise the profile of their films ahead of hitting AMC+ and/or Shudder, depending on its genre. This isn’t something necessarily to doom about, even if it isn’t the strongest performance.
9. Mother Mary: The A24 picture saw a 600+% increase! That just means it went wide from a very limited release. It went from four theatres week-over-week to well over 1,000. This did not do well, but doesn’t feel like it was expected to do well. It’s a very inaccessible ghost story starring Anne Hathaway, and seemed to be more about building relationships with filmmakers and building their library moreso than turning a profit. The lack of marketing, and the fact they kind of buried its release is more telling than anything else.
10. American Youngboy: A concert film on only around 500 screens, this is more damning for the films that didn’t make it in.
Missing from the top ten, notably, is I Swear. This was never going to be a massive hit stateside, but SCP’s strategy of picking sleeper awards contenders didn’t pay off this time, especially seeing as its April release will require a strong box office to ride the Oscar wave in the 2027 campaign. This movie’s biggest problem may not even be the quality or content of the film itself, rather that it’s most notable in the United States for the BAFTA controversy earlier this year. The subject of the film had an unfortunate tourettes outburst during a presentation by Sinners stars Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan, ultimately dominating the conversation surrounding it.
One thing outside of the top ten that did extremely well: Fight Club. Not a lot about Fight Club can be said, because rules and all that, but the David Fincher film made over $200K in a re-release domestically. This is another example, especially after last year’s re-release of another Fincher-Brad Pitt project Se7en, that people are willing to pay to see money in theatres after they see a second-life on streaming.
Looking ahead to next weekend, the long-awaited Devil Wears Prada sequel looks to benefit most, especially with the PLF screens in its favor. NEON’s Hokum, a supernatural horror starring Severence star Adam Scott, should do relatively well compared to its budget. But there does seem to be a lot of diversity in next week’s slate: That Time I Got Re-Incarnated as a Slime will see its second franchise installment as Crunchyroll continues to get into the theatrical game, Angel Studios is releasing Animal Farm, an animated-family film directed by Andy Serkis based off of the Orwell novel, which, is an intriguing thing for Angel Studios of all places to be distributing, a Renny Harlin (Cliffhanger, The Long Kiss Goodnight) survival thriller Deep Water and RZA’s One Spoon of Chocolate, presented by Quentin Tarantino. Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever and 2022’s Best Picture Everything Everywhere All at Once will also be seeing re-releases.
Dirt Sheet Radio and Comicbook Clique will keep you up-to-date on the box office going forward.
Photo credit: Lionsgate.
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.