Refresh for analysis It’s a very good start to the year with all movies grossing $134.7M this weekend; in fact that’s the best first weekend of a New Year post-Covid, besting 2023’s $104.2M. Nothing melodramatic going on, just a solid holdover frame. Compared to the first weekend of 2020, before Covid shut us down and when Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker ruled, weekend one of 2026 is only -11% off from that frame (which did $142.4M per Box Office Mojo).
When the box office year starts off great in weekend one, it’s never any indication of good luck or chi going forward, i.e. we’re beginning 2026 +29% over the first weekend in 2025; percentile wise that doesn’t mean we land there, of course.
Largely everything overperformed in relation to their Friday standings; sources in distribution say whatever we lost in the Christmas holiday stretch in the front-end, we’d make it up on the back-end this weekend: Avatar: Fire and Ash is coming in at $40M for weekend 3 (and near domestic cume of $306M) and Zootopia 2 at $19M for weekend 6 (cume of $363.6M). Saturday was higher than many forecasted with some films in the top 10 up between 10%-17% over Friday. Today will take a steep dive of -35% to -40% for most titles in the top 10. Still waiting on Disney’s global on Avatar: Fire and Ash but it’s well north of $1 billion global, and was always bound to get there this weekend as we first told you.
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