Cinemark said Monday that July 31 through August 2 was the biggest domestic weekend box office in the company's history, driven by the opening of Spider-Man: Brand New Day and a strong second weekend for The Odyssey. The Sony and Marvel film delivered Cinemark's best three-day domestic opening ever, beating a record Avengers: Endgame had held since 2019.
Industry-wide, the picture was the same. Brand New Day took in $360 million domestically, edging past Endgame's $357.1 million for the largest opening weekend in box office history. It added $572 million overseas for a $932 million global debut, the second-biggest ever, and set records for the largest Thursday previews at $72 million and the largest single day at $168 million on Friday.
The weekend arrived four days after Cinemark reported a quarter that was already a first. Second-quarter revenue reached $1.09 billion, up 15.5% from a year earlier and the first time the 42-year-old chain has cleared $1 billion in a single quarter. Net income was $139.4 million, or $1.19 a share, against 63 cents a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA of $294 million beat the previous company record by 20%.
The money isn't only in tickets
What the two announcements have in common is where the growth came from, and it wasn't just more seats sold.
Admissions revenue hit an all-time high of $540 million in the quarter, but concessions brought in $433 million — nearly as much — on record domestic per-capita spending of $8.70. Merchandise cleared $25 million globally, helped by film-tie-in collectibles: a Yoshi popcorn bucket from The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Grogu items from The Mandalorian and Grogu, a red popcorn purse pegged to The Devil Wears Prada 2. Over the Spider-Man weekend, food and beverage revenue was the highest Cinemark has ever recorded.
Premium formats did the other half of the work. Cinemark XD, ScreenX and D-BOX motion seats each posted their best-ever quarter and then their best-ever three-day weekend. XD accounted for 13% of Cinemark's global box office in 2025 on 5% of its screens — the clearest illustration of why exhibitors have spent years pushing customers toward the more expensive ticket rather than simply chasing volume.
Movie Club, the chain's monthly ticket subscription, passed 1.5 million members and accounted for roughly 30% of domestic box office in the quarter. Across all its loyalty programs Cinemark counts nearly 30 million enrolled moviegoers.
Why it matters
Theatrical exhibition spent the first half of this decade being written off. Cinemark's own share price and the sector's debt loads reflected an assumption that streaming had permanently reset how many people would leave the house for a movie. The last two quarters complicate that story: more than 60 million people went to a Cinemark in the second quarter alone.
The caveat is that none of this is evidence exhibitors have solved anything on their own. Records at the box office are a function of what the studios release, and 2026 gave theaters an unusually dense run of event films. Cinemark's contribution was capturing more revenue per visit — recliners, XD, food, merchandise, subscriptions — which is real and durable, but it works best when a Spider-Man fills the building.
The rest of the year will test how much of the improvement is structural. Cinemark's slate through December includes Practical Magic 2, Resident Evil, Verity, The Cat in the Hat, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, and a December 18 collision between Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday, with Jumanji: Open World on Christmas. If per-capita spending holds up in the quieter months between those, the case that moviegoing has genuinely stabilized gets a lot stronger. If it doesn't, this was a very good summer.
