Cocktails and Movies Never Stopped Loving Going To The Movies…
I’ve spent the summer working hard on a screenplay and about to embark on horror script next week for Halloween. And have been writing this since Backrooms and Obsession opened this summer, so forgive me if it feels disjointed.
But, apparently movies are back. Again. But, did they REALLY go away?
Hollywood has spent much of the last five years wondering whether audiences still wanted to go out to movie theaters. There have been endless stories about the death of theatrical movies exhibition, the rise of streaming, superhero fatigue, franchise fatigue, ticket prices, shorter attention spans and whether an entire generation would rather stare at a six-inch screen than a sixty-foot one.
And then the summer 2026 box office happened.
Maybe the real question was never whether people still loved movies in general. Maybe they were waiting for enough movies worth leaving the house to go and see.
When Labor Day closed the traditional summer movie season yesterday, the domestic box office had generated approximately $4.76 billion from May 1st through September 7th, aka the “summer movies season.” It surpassed the $4.755 billion record set in 2013, making summer 2026 the biggest summer box office ever in unadjusted dollars. The comparison does come with some qualifications, especially for inflation and the fact that the 2026 calendar gave the season several extra days, but after COVID, the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, production shutdowns and years of release-date changes, it is still one hell of a box office.
More importantly, audiences did not get there by watching any one kind of movie. They came for superheroes and horror movies, animation and prestige filmmaking, sequels and original ideas, Spielberg and Nolan, movies born from billion-dollar franchises and movies born on YouTube. That variety was probably the most encouraging part of the entire summer.
From Memorial Day to Labor Day, Something Was Happening
The summer began early on May 1st, with The Devil Wears Prada 2 eventually earning more than $220 million domestically, while Curry Barker’s tiny horror film Obsession arrived May 15th and became one of the most improbable success stories of the year. But Memorial Day is the unofficial starting gun for summer, and Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu came out that weekend with an $81.7 million opening.
A week later, things got much more interesting. Backrooms, adapted by 21-year-old Kane Parsons from the internet horror phenomenon he helped popularize on YouTube, opened to more than $81 million. Scary Movie followed with a $54 million debut. Steven Spielberg returned with Disclosure Day. Then Pixar delivered Toy Story 5, which opened to nearly $160 million and eventually reached almost $480 million domestically and $1.1 billion worldwide.
July took the summer to another level. Minions & Monsters arrived for the Fourth of July stretch, Christopher Nolan followed with The Odyssey, and then Spider-Man: Brand New Day basically dropped a huge comic book-sized piano on the box office. The new Spider-Man opened July 31st to an extraordinary $360 million domestically (best debut EVER), has spent six consecutive weekends at No. 1 and had reached roughly $923 million in North America by the end of Labor Day, now putting it within range of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and its long-standing domestic record. Worldwide, it had already passed $2.4 billion.
That is not merely a successful sequel. That is the kind of genuine cultural event the summer movie season has traditionally been built around.
The Movies That Made the Summer
The biggest domestic releases of the summer were led by Spider-Man: Brand New Day, followed by The Odyssey with roughly $589 million, Toy Story 5 with about $480 million, Obsession with $263 million, The Devil Wears Prada 2with $221 million, Backrooms with $198 million, Minions & Monsters with about $183 million, Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu with $178 million, Moana with about $126 million and Spielberg’s Disclosure Day with approximately $117 million.
But the biggest movies and the movies that defined the summer are not necessarily the same list.
There is no argument about the commercial champion. Spider-Man: Brand New Day owned the summer. But Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey may ultimately be the movie people remember when they talk about what happened to theatrical moviegoing in 2026. Nolan took Homer, a story that is nearly 3,000 years old, turned it into an R-rated, nearly three-hour epic and watched audiences actively hunt for the biggest and best screens available to see it.
By Labor Day, The Odyssey had reached approximately $1.6 billion worldwide, becoming Nolan’s highest-grossing movie and the highest-grossing R-rated film ever. Its success was fueled heavily by IMAX and other premium formats, and July became IMAX’s biggest month ever. Audiences were not simply choosing what movie they wanted to see. They were choosing how they wanted to see it. And they waited; IMAX screenings were sold out for months, with people going in the wee hours to see it.
That may be one of the biggest lessons Hollywood should take from the summer. Theaters cannot compete with the living room on convenience. They can compete by offering something the living room cannot reproduce.
Obsession, Backrooms and the Generation That Was Supposed to Kill Theaters
Then there is Obsession.
Curry Barker’s horror film reportedly cost just $750,000 and ended its domestic run with more than $263 million, eventually passing $500 million worldwide. Its opening weekend was only $17 million, but instead of collapsing like most modern horror movies, its weekends actually grew as word of mouth spread. Focus Features suddenly had the biggest movie in the studio’s history.
Barker is 26 and came out of YouTube. So did Kane Parsons, whose Backrooms cost considerably more but still only about $10 million and made nearly $200 million domestically.
Think about that for a second. Two filmmakers who developed their audiences through the internet persuaded huge numbers of young people to put down those same phones, buy tickets and sit in a theater for two hours.
There is a generational pattern here that Hollywood has seen before, just through different creative pipelines. Gen X filmmakers often came up through the music-video world, where directors like David Fincher and Spike Jonze learned how to create visual identity, energy and story in a matter of minutes. The next generation increasingly cut its teeth in commercials, branded content and early digital filmmaking, learning how to sell an idea quickly and make polished work on tighter schedules.
Maybe Gen Z was never going to kill moviegoing. Maybe they’re going to help reinvent it.
Research released by Cinema United going into 2026 already showed Gen Z theatrical attendance rising sharply, and the summer reinforced it. Younger audiences turned out strongly for Obsession, Backrooms and Spider-Man, while women contributed significantly to titles including The Devil Wears Prada 2, Michael and Scary Movie. Reuters reported that the summer’s strength came in part from a broader demographic mix returning to theaters rather than one narrow audience carrying the business.
A healthy theatrical marketplace is not everybody going to the same movie. It is everybody finding a movie for them.
The Best Movies Were Not Necessarily the Biggest Ones
The other encouraging part of summer 2026 was that there was room for movies with personality.
The Odyssey earned some of the year’s strongest reviews while proving that audiences will embrace something enormous, challenging and unmistakably filmmaker-driven. Obsession turned a nasty little horror premise into a legitimate cultural phenomenon. Backrooms proved that internet mythology could successfully make the transition to theatrical filmmaking.
Spielberg’s Disclosure Day did not become one of the summer’s giant commercial winners, but it was one of its more interesting films, earning strong reviews for bringing Spielberg’s sense of wonder back to science fiction while still finding something new to say about communication, fear and empathy.
Olivia Wilde’s The Invite was another reminder that adult movies still have a place in theaters. It never approached blockbuster territory, but strong reviews and word of mouth kept it in the conversation, exactly the kind of smaller adult-driven movie that has often struggled to find theatrical oxygen during the streaming era.
Then there was Coyote vs. Acme. A movie that was once destined to disappear into a corporate accounting write-off finally reached theaters in late August and arrived to terrific reviews and audience scores. After years of being held up as the symbol of everything wrong with a studio treating completed movies as disposable assets, audiences finally got to decide for themselves whether they wanted to see it. They did.
There is something almost too perfect about one of the final success stories of the biggest summer box office season ever being a movie Hollywood once decided nobody needed to see.
Summer Movies And The Oscar Race
The fall festivals are only beginning, so plenty can change between now and the 99th Academy Awards in March. But summer 2026 did something else unusual. It produced legitimate Oscar contenders before awards season had really started.
At the moment, The Odyssey is not merely “in the conversation.” It is sitting at or near the top of it. Current awards consensus has the film at No. 1 for Best Picture, Christopher Nolan at No. 1 for Best Director and Matt Damon at or near the top of the Best Actor race for Odysseus. Anne Hathaway’s Penelope has emerged as one of the early frontrunners in Supporting Actress, while members of the ensemble including Robert Pattinson and John Leguizamo are appearing in supporting-actor predictions. Nolan is also expected to contend for Adapted Screenplay, while the film should be formidable in cinematography, editing, production design, sound, score, costumes and other craft categories.
The more surprising awards story may again be Obsession. Focus Features has officially launched a major Oscar campaign with Inde Navarrette competing for Best Actress for her performance as Nikki. Curry Barker is being pushed for Best Director, Original Screenplay and Film Editing, with the movie itself going for Best Picture and virtually every applicable craft category. Variety has been beating the drum for Navarrette’s performance since May, arguing that her mixture of horror, physical performance, comedy and tragedy deserves serious awards attention.
That is a remarkable leap for a $750,000 horror movie from a first-time feature director who built his following on YouTube. It also comes one year after horror made major gains with Academy voters, which means the old assumption that “the Oscars don’t nominate horror” is becoming increasingly obsolete.
Disclosure Day is also hanging around the conversation, particularly for Spielberg and Josh O’Connor, while its sound and visual work could keep it alive in the craft races. The Invite has Olivia Wilde appearing in early directing discussions and Penélope Cruz in the Supporting Actress conversation. Toy Story 5 should be a major Animated Feature contender, while several of the summer’s larger spectacles will likely remain factors in technical categories even if their Best Picture chances are considerably slimmer.
The interesting part is that the awards conversation and the box office conversation are overlapping again. For years Hollywood sometimes behaved as if a movie could either be culturally important, financially successful or critically respected, but rarely all three. The Odyssey and Obsession are making a fairly persuasive argument otherwise.
Not Everything Is Fixed, Though
We shouldn’t celebrate the summer without pretending every problem facing theatrical exhibition suddenly disappeared.
Ticket sales are still below 2019 levels. Higher average ticket prices and premium-format surcharges helped summer 2026 generate record revenue even though actual admissions remain behind the pre-pandemic era. Hollywood also released only 34 wide releases this summer compared with 44 in 2019.
Oddly enough, that second number may be encouraging. Theaters generated record summer revenue with ten fewer wide releases than they had seven years ago. If studios can rebuild the release pipeline and give theaters a more consistent supply of movies throughout the year, there is still room to grow.
The challenge is no longer proving people will leave home and go to theaters. They clearly will.
The challenge is giving them enough reasons to do it often. (Can we suggest TWO days of discounted tickets? Or a day of discounted FOOD?)
Moviegoing Is An Experience Again
Premium formats are part of that answer. IMAX, Dolby, 70mm and other large-format presentations are increasingly turning the format itself into part of the ticket purchase. The Odyssey was the clearest example, but the phenomenon goes beyond Nolan.
So do repertory screenings, event cinema, specialty programming and independent theaters. Younger audiences are discovering older films theatrically and treating moviegoing as something social rather than simply transactional. That is an important distinction in an era when virtually every movie will eventually become available on a television at home.
People can watch movies anywhere.
They go to movie theaters because they want to go somewhere.
That shared experience remains something streaming cannot replicate. Hundreds of strangers willingly entering a dark room, shutting up for a couple of hours and agreeing to experience the same story together still has value. You know, kind of like we do here at Cocktails and Movies.
Maybe more than ever.
2026 Isn’t Finished
The summer may be over, but the release calendar certainly is not. The fall brings films including Practical Magic 2, Resident Evil, The Social Reckoning, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping and a growing slate of festival and awards contenders. Then December turns into its own box office cage match when Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three both arrive December 18, followed by Jumanji: Open World and Robert Eggers’ Werwulf on Christmas Day.
Analysts now believe the domestic box office has a legitimate shot at topping $10 billion in 2026, something the business has not accomplished since 2019.
If that happens, maybe we can finally retire the phrase “movie theater comeback.”
Summer 2027
Next summer is not exactly taking its foot off the accelerator either. The current calendar includes Star Wars: Starfighter for Memorial Day weekend, followed in June by How to Train Your Dragon 2, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse and Shrek 5. July currently has James Gunn’s Man of Tomorrow, A Minecraft Movie Squared and A Quiet Place Part III, with Bluey: The Movie arriving in August.
Those dates will move. They always do. The interesting question is what we do not know yet.
What is next summer’s Obsession?
What movie currently sitting on a hard drive, being edited by some filmmaker most people have never heard of, becomes the thing everybody suddenly has to see?
That is the part of summer 2026 that should make movie fans happiest. Yes, Spider-Man can still make $2 billion. Yes, Woody and Buzz still matter. But audiences also showed that they are willing to discover something new.
Hollywood should grab a cocktail, sit up and pay attention.
Final Pour
So was summer 2026 the summer movies came back? Sure, if that’s the headline everybody wants to use.
Those of us who kept going to theaters might phrase it differently. The movies never left, and the audience never stopped loving them. What audiences needed were movies that felt worth making the trip for. This summer they got them.
They watched Spider-Man swing across a screen the size of a building. They sailed across the ancient world with Odysseus. They brought their kids back to see Woody and Buzz. They turned two young YouTube horror filmmakers into theatrical success stories. They finally got to see Wile E. Coyote escape a corporate vault. They laughed together, screamed together and somewhere along the way delivered the biggest summer box office in history.
Not bad for a supposedly dying business.
And as for us, CocktailsAndMovies.com took a little summer break.
The movies clearly did not.
Now we’re back too.
So come join us as we head into what could be an incredible fall and holiday movie season. We’ll be breaking down the box office again, digging into the movies worth seeing, finding the hidden ones you might have missed and, naturally, figuring out what we should be drinking while we watch them.
The lights are going down. Grab your popcorn. We’ve got some movies to see. 🍸🍿
Note: AI was used in the research and outlining of this article.
