A lot of movies have been big at the box office this year, many of them from Universal Pictures. 2026 isn’t over yet, but that isn’t stopping the studio from bragging about how much money it’s made so far and the milestones it’s hit.
Deadline reports that Universal’s the first studio to collectively make over $5 billion at the box office in 2026. It previously hit this goal in 2015 and 2017, and over $3 billion of this year’s success is thanks to international audiences. Looking at the top 10 movies of the year, over half of them are from Universal: The Odyssey takes the top spot at over $1.7 billion, with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Michael, Obsession, and Backrooms coming in behind it.
Of those movies, many have had pretty long legs at the box office, seeing either minimal week-to-week declines or increases, in some cases. While Mario generally came and went, the other movies have been good at staying in the general conversation for weeks on end. In the course of a single summer, we’ve seen Backrooms return to theaters, Obsession prepare to join Halloween Horror Nights, and we’re all preparing to see how Odyssey does come awards season.
But Universal still has some more movies in it as the year winds down: for the genre heads, Forgotten Island is in theaters this weekend, with Other Mommy coming for the horror crowd in two weeks on October 9. Then come the holidays, there’s Violent Night 2 on December 4 and Werwulf on Christmas. However those later films fare against Avengers: Doomsday, this has largely been Universal’s year, and it knows it.
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