Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-CEO, stood on a stage at Last April’s Time100 Summit and told the assembled room that the movie theater model was, in his own words, “outdated.” Most Americans, he explained, can’t even walk to a multiplex. They’d rather watch at home, “thank you.” He allowed, generously, that theaters could still be admired as an experience, the way you might admire a steam engine in a museum, before urging filmmakers to focus on the fans and quietly retire from putting their films on the big screen altogether.
It turns out (shockingly) that a tech-bro does not speak for all the fans, nor does he speak for all the films and filmmakers, as theatres this weekend prove that in the only currency that these techbros understand: by making money, an enormous and record-breaking pile of it.
The entire North American marketplace hit a record $434 million weekend across all films, according to Rentrak, driven by Sony and Marvel Studios’ Spider-Man: Brand New Day posting a $360 million domestic opening, the biggest ever in box-office history. Brand New Day beat the record previously held by Avengers: Endgame’s all-time domestic opening of $357.1 million.
The last time the moviegoing business saw an overall weekend record like this was the final weekend of 2019, when the industry as a whole hit $402 million. Even the best post-COVID weekend on record, 2023’s Barbenheimer double bill, only managed $311.3 million by comparison. This weekend didn’t just beat that. It did laps around it.
Not only that, this is up 246% from the same weekend a year ago. Year to date, the North American box office sits at $6.19 billion through August 2nd, up 15% on last year. A $4 billion summer and a $10 billion year are currently in the cards for the domestic box office, numbers the industry hasn’t touched since the pre-pandemic peak of 2019.
And here’s the true irony of Sarandos’s statement that makes this whole thing sing: all of this is happening while Netflix’s own stock recorded a 12-month low point of $67 the day The Odyssey was released and was still at a relative low point of $71 this Friday, when every theatre was flooded by people flocking to see the new Spider-Man film. The company whose co-CEO stood up and pronounced cinema a relic is currently watching its own valuation slide while the industry he wrote off does donuts in the parking lot.
Sony, meanwhile, didn’t just stop at scoring the best opening of all time. They also announced they’re reopening the Cinerama Dome and the Hollywood Arclight in early 2028, two of Los Angeles’s genuine cathedral-grade cinemas, resurrected once again after a couple of years of techbros telling the world nobody wants to leave the house anymore.