According to the U.S. media‘s “Deadline” website reported on August 2nd, Universal Pictures, relying on the market performance of its various films such as “Odyssey” and “Super Mario Galaxy Movie”, surpassed Disney in one fell swoop, becoming this year‘s first Hollywood studio with global box office sales exceeding $4 billion. However, under intense market competition, Hollywood still faces multiple crises, and future development contains numerous uncertain factors.
Odyssey Poster
The competition between Hollywood‘s major studios has always been intense: by the end of June, Disney was still the first company this year to break $3 billion in global box office sales; by July, Universal Pictures later took the lead – mainly thanks to Nolan‘s new film “Odyssey”, which after its release in mid-July had global box office sales exceeding $911 million, and will subsequently be officially released in important box office locations such as China.
So far, in 2026, only three movies had global box office sales exceeding $1 billion, of which Universal Pictures was responsible for distributing two – “Super Mario Galaxy Movie” and “Michael Jackson: The Way of the Stars”. In addition, the summer season animation blockbuster “Little Yellow Man and the Big Monster” is also a major IP work under Universal Pictures, currently having global box office sales of $440 million. The focus film industry that launched “Obsession” is also affiliated with Universal Pictures, this low-cost thriller earning $470 million in global box office sales with the momentum of a “black horse”.
In the eyes of industry media such as Variety, although Hollywood now has a warming trend, it still faces many potential crises: classic IP popularity is fading, industry innovation drive is insufficient, and major studios are busy merging or compressing the supply of new films. “Not all films can elicit audience resonance. Those once mainstream genres have encountered failure. For example, Warner‘s ‘Super Girl’ invested $170 million, with global box office sales of only $125 million.” Variety also listed films such as ‘Cosmic Giants: The Rise of Hyman’ and ‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian and the Ancient’ that failed to meet expectations in box office, “showing that now IP popularity alone is not enough to make films sell. To borrow the words of Phil Rod, one of the directors of ‘Rescue Plan’, fresh creativity and superior quality are the key.”
At the same time, various production companies are still fighting for “survival,” with Paramount and Netflix “buying” Warner in fits and starts, and with various mergers planned by traditional studios, the number of movies produced and distributed in Hollywood has all decreased. In North America, the window period for movies from theaters to online has been broken from the industry‘s default 90-day period in the past, and now major studios are rethinking based on market conditions, trying to fix the window period at 45 days. Another risk in the social network era is word of mouth, and once bad word of mouth ferments online, subsequent box office trends are difficult to maintain. How to cover audiences of different ages and bring viewers over 40 back to theaters is also a big problem.
“By 2025, the number of films and television productions in Los Angeles had fallen by nearly 40 percent in 10 years, and there were 25 percent fewer jobs in the local film and television industry than there were in 2022.” A recent review article in the British magazine The Spectator claimed that Hollywood studios were making too few films at too high a cost, and that a “crash crisis” in funding and creativity was steadily draining the entire industry. The article argued that 2026‘s surface optimism was more like self-comfort, “a major change is under way.” A director and producer who has worked in Hollywood for 20 years puts it this way: “Meteorites have hit the earth, but the dinosaurs don‘t know it.” According to Amazon Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer‘s director of film, streaming, and drama, Courtney Valenti, “We must be very forward-looking, stay flexible, and keep innovating.”