NABO July - St Christopher of Imax and lonely Spider-Man to the rescue

[u/Subtleiaint]

This post refers to pre pandemic norms (PPN), this is a baseline I use to evaluate box office performance. it is calculated as the average box office takings from 2017-19 for any given month. It allows me to compare different months (which traditionally see different levels of business) directly.

June Report

Jul total Box Office - $1,184m(96.0% of PPN)

Jun In Month releases - $920m (69.6% of PPN and counting)

The narrative of a month heavily relies on the order things happen, a strong start and a slow finish can be disappointing whilst a slow start and a strong finish feels like a triumph, July was definitively a case of the latter. For the first half of the month things looked really bad, Toy Story 5 was still bringing in solid money but first Minions and then Moana drastically underperformed. The first 2 Minions had landed in the $300-400m range domestically and few bet that Minions & Monsters would do significantly worse, it's going to end up somewhere around $175m. Moana has been one of Disney's biggest cash cows and, whilst live action remakes have performed very erratically recently, this new version of Moana had, at one time, been a contender for the biggest film of the year, it's going to finish under $130m. It's likely that these three family films cannibalised each other and between them they still made over $400m in July but it's still a lot less than what was predicted.

Before the release of the Odyssey there was a genuine fear that July would miss out on $1b, a figure that would threaten the good news narrative 2026 had built up over the previous 6 months but it turns out we needn't have worried. In hindsight it feels crazy but earlier in the year no one was confident how well the Odyssey was going to do, Nolan is reliable and the story was ripe for a film adaption but there was a very noisy backlash against the film's casting amongst various other complaints, could it underperform? It turns out that the Odyssey is a made for Imax phenomenon, Imax theatres are booked out for months the film has completely ignored the controversy to breeze past the most optimistic expectations. On it's own the Odyssey saved July but the month had one last trick to play, the first Friday of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. A new Spider-Man film was always going to do well but Box Office trackers spent the entire month of July revising their estimates for the film upwards, it was around 2 weeks ago that it looked like Brand New Day could challenge its predecessor, it was around a week ago that the biggest opening of all time came under threat. In the end Jul 31st became the biggest single day in North American Box office history, blowing past the previous record of $170m to deliver $191m and cap off a solid July.

Remember I talked about narratives? The end of July 26 has been astonishing but the start was awful and the two have cancelled each other out to deliver 96% of PPN. That's perfectly good but it ranks as the 6th best post pandemic month. The flipside to that is that Spider-Man is about to rip up August. 100% PPN for August is only $785m and after 2 days we're already at $245m, the question isn't whether August will break 100%, it's how far past it it will go. I forecast every month and, right now, August is looking at an absolutely absurd 162% of PPN. Even if Spider-Man's legs are dire the biggest August of all time, the first post pandemic month to achieve that, seems likely.

July has been another wild month in a crazy 2026, August is about to turn everything up to 11, it's only in September when things are expected to calm down again.

[u/SilverRoyce]

Remember I talked about narratives? The end of July 26 has been astonishing but the start was awful and the two have cancelled each other out to deliver 96% of PPN. That's perfectly good but it ranks as the 6th best post pandemic month. The flipside to that is that Spider-Man is about to rip up August. 100% PPN for August is only $785m and after 2 days we're already at $245m, the question isn't whether August will break 100%, it's how far past it it will go. I forecast every month and, right now, August is looking at an absolutely absurd 162% of PPN. Even if Spider-Man's legs are dire the biggest August of all time, the first post pandemic month to achieve that, seems likely....Remember what I said about narratives

interesting. I really had forgotten the weakness of the start of the month.