Domestic opening weekends, 1989–2026
A dollar of opening weekend in 1989 isn't a dollar in 2026. Ticket prices rose, screens multiplied, previews got longer. So we score every opening against the biggest debuts of its own era. Pick any film, then send it to any year.
Equivalent opening weekend in 2026
Batman opened to $40.5M in 1989, 2.58 times that era's typical big opening.
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Every film that cracked its year's top ten openings since 1989. 380 dots. Watch what happens when you stop grading them in today's dollars.
Here's the league table everyone usually looks at. Up and to the right, forever. By this measure every record is set in the last ten years.
But the bar rose too. The dashed line is replacement level: the typical top-ten opening of the surrounding decade. It climbed from about $16M in 1989 to over $110M today.
Divide every opening by its era's bar and multiply by 100. The line goes flat. Now Batman stands beside Endgame, and a $40M weekend from 1989 outranks almost everything Marvel ever did.
Color the films that weren't sequels, comics, toys or remakes. In the '90s they mixed it up with the franchises. Look how thin the pink gets on the right.
And the floor: the pandemic year, when the year's "biggest" openings scored as low as 11.
Play
Two openings, two eras. The dollar figures are right there, and they'll mislead you. Pick the one that was the bigger event in its own year.
Which opening was the bigger deal?
Tap a ticket.
The trend
The single best opening each year by a film that wasn't a sequel, comic, toy, game or remake. Original screenplays, history and public-domain stories only.
From 2005 to 2025, no original film opened above replacement level. The closest was The Secret Life of Pets at 99.5.
This July, The Odyssey broke the drought at 110.7, on a Sunday studio estimate. Homer, it turns out, is public domain.
Marquee
Ranked by Opening+, with where each film would land if you ranked all 380 by raw dollars.
How it works
Opening+ = 100 × a film's opening ÷ the geometric mean of 100 replacement openings: the top ten domestic openings from each of ten surrounding years, skipping the film's own year and 2020. 100 is a typical elite opening for its era.
A film's score times another year's replacement level. Batman scores 257.6; 2026's bar is $112.5M; so 2.576 × $112.5M ≈ $290M. It's a translation, not a forecast.
Original screenplays, history, mythology, scripture and public-domain classics count. Sequels, remakes, comics, games, toys, TV, musicals and modern books don't.
Descriptive, not causal. Marketing, theater counts, premium formats and longer preview windows aren't modeled. 2026 scores are provisional.
Data: domestic three-day openings via Box Office Mojo, compiled in the Opening+ workbook, updated July 20, 2026.