Which actually kicked off a little roundtable conversation in The A.V. Club‘s Slack channels on Friday afternoon, where we—as occasionally susceptible to silly games with movie numbers as anybody else—tried to work out whether either member of Hollywood power couple Tom Holland and Zendaya, who both appear in both films, was about to have the biggest box office year of all time. (Nobody’s touching Zoe Saldaña for the overall record, meanwhile; that’s the power of all those Avatar, Avengers, Pirates, and Star Trek movies.) Neither Holland nor Zendaya is likely to top the one-two punch Holland landed back in 2019, when he appeared in both Spider-Man: Far From Home and biggest-all-timer Avengers: Endgame. But Zendaya is giving her new husband a pretty decent run for the studios’ money: Besides Odyssey and Brand New Day, she had The Drama earlier this year, which brought in a tidy $135 million, and will star in the third installment in Denis Villeneuve’s highly lucrative Dune franchise before the year is out.
And while we’re playing these ultimately meaning-light games with numbers, it’s worth noting that, for those who use the billion mark as a barometer of Hollywood’s box office health, 2026 is in pretty damn good shape. Five—which is almost guaranteed to become at least six before the year is out, courtesy of Avengers: Doomsday—is already the most movies to clear the bar since the COVID-19 lockdowns. And while 2026 might not end up breaking the record 8 movies that did so in 2019—a year where movie audiences were going so nuts they were giving, like, Aladdin a billion bucks—the year is still on track to beat every other year on record on that score.
