Just a few months ago, if you had asked any theater owner about their thoughts on what 2026 would bring, you probably would’ve gotten a bright, optimistic response. More movies are on the way, there are fewer signs of months-long product droughts on the horizon and millions of moviegoers are expected to pour in thanks to the return of the Avengers, Mario and Princess Peach and Christopher Nolan.
For all of these reasons, Bruce Nash, founder of the box office site The Numbers, projected a $9.8 billion domestic total for 2026, with a puncher’s chance at achieving the first $10 billion-plus year since the pandemic. In 2025, the box office tallied $8.87 billion.
But this year’s potential return to pre-pandemic levels of normalcy following a 2025 that eked out a slight gain over 2024 could be rendered meaningless as theaters face what they deem an existential crisis with the looming merger between Netflix and Warner Bros. Given Netflix’s historic cold shoulder to theaters and the disruptive force it has already had on the overall entertainment industry, the fear is that even a fruitful year at the box office might not mean anything in the long run.
“The chilling effect would be indescribable,” said a movie theater owner about the potential impact. “So many people have already been trained to wait for streaming. That accelerates if DC movies hit Netflix two weeks after they get to theaters.”
For now, the industry needs to see how everything shakes out. Nothing that transpires between Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, Paramount CEO David Ellison or the hordes of federal and overseas regulators who will be scrutinizing the deal will have any impact on the 2026 box office. Regardless of how it shakes out, the approval process could drag into 2027.
As such, it’s business as usual for Warner Bros.’ film division as it prepares to release 16 films this coming year, ranging from franchises like DC’s “Supergirl” and New Line’s “Mortal Kombat II” to auteur-driven films like Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger.”
Meanwhile, other tailwinds that gave exhibitors their pre-Warnerflix optimism are still in play. Amazon MGM has a full slate of wide releases ready to be unleashed starting in January with “Mercy” and continuing with titles like Ryan Gosling-starrer “Project Hail Mary,” “Masters of the Universe” and Colleen Hoover adaptation “Verity” as it seeks to fill the gap left by Disney’s assimilation of 20th Century Fox.
New specialty distributors like Row K and Black Bear are expected to vie with the likes of A24, Focus, Neon and Mubi, potentially revitalizing an indie market still running at half-speed. Paramount, flush with Skydance money, is expected to add several more films to its current slate of nine 2026 releases and has plans to ramp up its theatrical acquisitions.
Sony will bring back Spider-Man and continues to build Crunchyroll into a key niche moneymaker. Lionsgate is ready to be a major box office player again with “Michael,” about the legendary pop star, more “Hunger Games” and its first full slate under studio chief Adam Fogelson, who took the reins at the beginning of 2024. Disney and Universal will bring plenty of tentpoles along with the ones mentioned above, including new “Minions” and “Toy Story” films. Disney will also keep trying to make original animated films work with “Hoppers” and “Hexed” while other studios join in with titles like Sony’s “GOAT” and DreamWorks’ “Forgotten Island.”
And yet, ask those same exhibitors — and some rival studio execs — about the Warner/Netflix deal, and their predictions are largely the same: If the deal goes through and Sarandos drastically chops down the theatrical window for Warner’s films to get them on streaming faster, any progress the box office makes in 2026 will be swiftly reversed.
“Warner brought $4 billion to the global box office in 2025. That gets decimated if their films go to Netflix after two weeks in theaters,” one studio executive who asked to remain anonymous told TheWrap.
Netflix has yet to define how long a theatrical window Warner Bros. films will have before hitting streaming, but the streamer has stuck to a 17-day maximum for most of its films over the last few years. Sarandos said Netflix will still support WB theatrical output, but teased that windows will “evolve to be much more consumer-friendly.”
The threat of such complete upheaval of the economic system of moviegoing makes it quite possible that any lessons learned from 2026’s box office results will have no application to 2027 and beyond. But with so much uncertainty surrounding the Netflix/Warner deal that will likely take the whole year to clear up, all we can do is keep our prognostications to the short term.
So with that in mind, here are the important themes to keep an eye out for in 2026.
A stronger start
As we noted in our 2025 box office review, the foremost reason why last year didn’t see a domestic total of $9 billion was because the slate for the first quarter of the year was shockingly poor, with just $1.02 billion grossed from films released within the first three months.
The release slate to open 2026 isn’t as threadbare. The usual crop of January horror films like Paramount’s “Primate” and Sony’s “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” will try to earn sleeper hit status, leading into a February that includes Paramount’s “Scream 7,” Sony Animation’s “GOAT,” and Warner Bros.’ “Wuthering Heights.”
And in March, a mix of original films and off-the-beaten-path adaptations will try to bring a big spring surprise. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” has been heavily touted by Warner Bros. chiefs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy as a fresh new take on monster movies, Disney/Pixar will have an original film with “Hoppers,” Universal will keep the Colleen Hoover train going with “Reminders of Him,” and Amazon MGM is hoping that it will have a blockbuster on its hands with Ryan Gosling’s “Project Hail Mary,” a sci-fi film based on the novel by “The Martian” author Andy Weir.
Can any original animation work?
You may have noticed that among the films listed above, two of them — “Hoppers” and “GOAT” — are original animated films.
This year will have plenty of sequels with “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” “Toy Story 5” and “Minions 3” among the bunch that are expected to challenge for the $1 billion global mark. But we are now coming up on nine years since the last time an original animated film grossed more than $500 million worldwide.
With misfires like “Strange World,” “Wish,” and “Elio,” Disney and Pixar have gotten shellacked for losing their audience with many of their new ideas. But when you look at the last five years, Disney and Pixar are the only studios that have seriously tried putting original films in theaters.
Aside from the 2023 film “Migration,” Illumination has been primarily focused on franchise IP. Paramount’s animated projects have also been based on franchises like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “SpongeBob SquarePants.” DreamWorks has focused on adaptations of young adult novels like “The Bad Guys” and “The Wild Robot,” and Sony moved the biggest original animated hit of the past five years, “KPop Demon Hunters,” to Netflix.
But in 2026, we will see more original films from several of these players. Sony has “GOAT,” an animated sports comedy about a goat joining a basketball league stocked with larger, more athletic animals. DreamWorks is putting out an original animated adventure film in September with “Forgotten Island,” and Walt Disney Animation will try to do better than “Wish” with its next original Thanksgiving offering, the magically-themed “Hexed.”
Sequels can only last studios for so long. New original hits, after all, become the franchises of the future. But first Hollywood has to figure out how to get families to give those originals a chance in theaters rather than wait for streaming.
“Warner brought $4 billion to the global box office in 2025. That gets decimated if their films go to Netflix after two weeks in theaters” – Anonymous studio executive
Franchise watch
As for the franchise animated offerings like “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie,” they are probably the most surefire hits on the 2026 slate. But there’s several others that are less clear — like the long-awaited return of “Star Wars.”
Nearly seven years after the release of the tepidly received “The Rise of Skywalker” and multiple theatrical projects that have sunk into development hell, Lucasfilm is finally bringing the galaxy far, far away back to the silver screen with “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” the feature film continuation of the franchise’s most commercially successful Disney+ series, “The Mandalorian.”
We’ve seen with “Demon Slayer” that a hit TV series can make the leap to the big screen, but do mass audiences still have the affinity for Baby Yoda that they did when “Mandalorian” premiered in 2019, or have they simply moved on?
Speaking of moving on, it’s clear from the performance of 2025’s superhero films that millions of moviegoers have done just that when it comes to Marvel and DC. Even “Superman,” the highest grossing of the bunch with $616 million worldwide, saw substantial decline in grosses in Asia compared to past comic book movies.
So how will DC’s 2026 films, “Supergirl” and the lower-budget horror-tinged thriller “Clayface,” fare in efforts to get “Superman” attendees to buy into the franchise for the long haul? Will the enduring popularity of Spider-Man allow Tom Holland’s return in Sony/Marvel’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” to buck the downward trend that has plagued MCU films that have introduced new heroes?
And most of all, how far will “Avengers: Doomsday” fall from the $2 billion-plus total of its predecessors “Infinity War” and “Endgame”? It’s still the odds-on favorite to be the year’s highest-grossing film, but some level of dropoff is baked in given that China is largely no longer interested in Marvel. Beyond that, it comes down to whether the return of Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans and the stars of the quarter-century-old “X-Men” films is enough to get lapsed fans to come back next winter.
Auteur-driven films
But if “Avengers: Doomsday” plummets beyond what even the most pessimistic prognosticators are predicting, the door is open for Hollywood’s most renowned filmmaker today to possibly take the top spot.
After turning a biopic about the creation of nuclear weapons into a near-$1 billion Best Picture Oscar winner, Christopher Nolan is looking at a potential new career record with his adaptation of Homer’s “The Odyssey.” The first trailer for the film racked up 121 million YouTube views in its first 24 hours, more than double the 50 million first-day total for “Oppenheimer.” With a global clout among moviegoers on the level with what Steven Spielberg had in the ’80s and ’90s, Nolan’s sword-and-sandals epic could pass even the $1 billion total of “The Dark Knight” and “The Dark Knight Rises.”
Speaking of Spielberg, he’s back with a new original alien sci-fi film this summer, “Disclosure Day,” while Tom Cruise is teaming up with “Birdman” director Alejandro G. Iñárritu for a dark comedy with next fall’s “Digger.” Robert Eggers, who gave Focus Features one of its biggest hits ever with “Nosferatu,” will be back next year with his next period horror film, “Werwulf.” And Greta Gerwig, using her “Barbie” clout, has negotiated with Netflix to release her “Narnia” film “The Magician’s Nephew” on Imax screens this Thanksgiving.
In other words, there will be plenty of auteur-driven films next year trying to win over audiences not with familiar characters, but with a unique filmmaking vision.
How many films will we get?
Cinema United projects that 115 wide release films will hit U.S. theaters in 2026. That would be helpful, but the more films, the better.
Beyond those wide releases, there’s the possibility that Sundance and Cannes could yield some potential specialty hits that get added to the slate by Neon, Mubi, and other distributors, old or new. Perhaps even Warner Bros. will get in on the festival action as the studio launched a yet-to-be-named specialty label with former Neon execs Christian Parkes, Jason Wald and Spencer Collantes, while Paramount is expanding its acquisitions plans under new exec Lia Buman.
Hollywood execs, including those at Warner, have said throughout the past year that they are going to increase their commitment to theatrical. It’s time for them to make good on their promise … especially if the Netflix deal is completed.
