No, this July didn’t quite measure up to last year’s #Barbenheimer phenomenon, but it came closer than you may have realized. With a $300 million (just in July) haul for Despicable Me 4 and a solid North American showing for both Twisters and Deadpool & Wolverine, July brought in $1.18 billion at the box office, down 13 percent from last year but above the $1.13 billion total for July 2022. Despite the mantra among theater chains and multiplex owners that they just need to “survive until ’25”—whereupon, Hollywood has convinced itself, studios will reset from Covid- and strike-aborted production flow—there are some signs of a quicker recovery. 

While we all understandably fretted about a May led by underperforming fare (IF, The Fall Guy, and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga), the story changed right after Memorial Day. From early June through early August, every weekend has featured either an overperforming new release (Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Inside Out 2, A Quiet Place: Day One, etcetera) or robust second-weekend holdover business from a recent tentpole. (Inside Out 2 and Deadpool 3 posted over/under $100 million second-weekend grosses.) Now, we’re entering the most crowded August since 2019, with the likes of Trap, Alien: Romulus, and It Ends With Us packing auditoriums—or at least ensuring they aren’t empty while the industry awaits the year-end deluge of tentpoles.