Highest grossing movie in 2026 Odds & Analysis
The 2026 box office crown is now a two-film question
The highest grossing movie 2026 odds have narrowed to a single question over the summer and fall. As of late October 2026, Spider-Man: Brand New Day trades at 93% on prediction markets, Avengers: Doomsday sits at 5.75%, and every other title on the board - Toy Story 5, The Odyssey, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Michael and the rest - has collapsed to 0.05%. The market is still open, with roughly $17.8 million traded, and it will not settle until Box Office Mojo publishes its December 31 numbers.
The key detail is the resolution rule. The contract pays out on the film with the highest domestic calendar gross in 2026, as listed in the "Gross" column of Box Office Mojo's 2026 calendar-grosses page. Only dollars earned between January 1 and December 31, 2026 in North America count. That one sentence explains almost everything about where the prices sit today. For traders on PredMart, the same rule decides whether a position in either finalist is worth holding into December.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day has already posted the number to beat
The summer did not play out the way the June board implied. Back then Spider-Man was bleeding odds as Toy Story 5 opened strongly. Then Brand New Day opened on July 31 and broke records. It took $360.1 million in its first domestic weekend, ahead of Avengers: Endgame's $357.1 million, the previous record, as Koimoi reported in August. Its second weekend added about $144 million. That gave it roughly $655 million after 10 days, the biggest 10-day domestic total ever, ahead of Endgame's $621.2 million (AP and Deadline figures, August 9).
The run kept going. Deadline reported in late August that it had passed Endgame's $858.3 million lifetime domestic total. On September 16, The Hollywood Reporter reported that it had passed Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($936.6 million) to become the highest-grossing film ever at the domestic box office. Box Office Mojo's 2026 calendar page now lists Brand New Day at $958.5 million. Worldwide trackers put it above $2.5 billion, but the worldwide figure plays no part in how this market settles.
That domestic total is the hurdle. The film is deep into its run and only adding small weekly amounts, so its final 2026 number will land a little above $958.5 million. Any challenger has to beat it with calendar-2026 dollars alone.
At 93%, the market says Spider-Man is very likely, but not certain, to take the crown. The bid-ask on the contract sits at 92 to 94 cents. The price has slipped about 2.5 points over the past week, while Avengers: Doomsday gained about 1.9 points as presale headlines piled up.
Why Toy Story 5, The Odyssey and the summer field are finished
The June version of this market was driven by Toy Story 5's opening and The Odyssey's trailer numbers. Both films did well. Neither came anywhere near the crown under a domestic calendar rule.
Box Office Mojo's 2026 calendar grosses, as of late October:
| Rank | Film | 2026 domestic calendar gross | Release |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Spider-Man: Brand New Day | $958.5M | Jul 31 |
| 2 | The Odyssey | $625.2M | Jul 17 |
| 3 | Toy Story 5 | $480.3M | Jun 19 |
| 4 | The Super Mario Galaxy Movie | $429.8M | Apr 1 |
| 5 | Michael | $372.3M | Apr 24 |
| 6 | Project Hail Mary | $344.1M | Mar 20 |
| 7 | Obsession | $263.5M | May 15 |
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is the year's second-biggest film. That is a huge result for an R-rated epic, and global trackers put it around $1.77 billion worldwide. Still, it trails Spider-Man by more than $330 million domestically, so its 0.05% price reflects real elimination, not a mispricing. Toy Story 5 opened big in June and finished about $478 million short. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie traded at 42% in March, and it is now a footnote at fourth place.
Every finished summer title is effectively at zero because its run is over. The contracts still listed at 0.05% are leftover resting orders, not live probability.
Avengers: Doomsday is the only live challenger, and the calendar works against it
Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18. Demand looks very strong. TheWrap reported $16.5 million in presales in the first 24 hours after Disney opened premium-format tickets on July 20. Later reports put advance sales at about $35 million by the end of August and $50 million by early September, 100 days before release. Industry tracker Global Box Office, cited by Koimoi in August, projected a domestic opening of $260 to $300 million. Some outlets have floated higher numbers, but those are forecasts, not tracking.
The problem is arithmetic, not demand. Doomsday gets just 14 days of 2026 domestic box office, December 18 through December 31. In those two weeks it would need more than $958.5 million to pass Spider-Man.
Put that against the records. Brand New Day itself holds the 10-day domestic record at about $655 million, and it did that with the biggest opening weekend in history. Even if Doomsday matched that pace and then had an unusually strong Christmas-to-New-Year stretch, it would most likely finish the calendar year hundreds of millions short. Grosses from January 2027 onward do not count, however large they are.
So how can Doomsday trade at 5.75% at all? There are three reasons:
- Tail risk on an unprecedented release. Holiday weekdays in late December are among the strongest days of the year, and a record opening plus record weekday holds would compress the gap. Traders paying 5-6 cents are pricing a small chance that the film breaks the opening-fortnight record by a very wide margin.
- Resolution-mechanics risk. Settlement depends on the Box Office Mojo calendar column once December 31 data is posted. If that data is missing by January 7, 2027, the rules allow "another credible resolution source." Some of the Avengers price is probably a hedge against that process risk, not a box office forecast.
- Headline momentum. Presale stories in October moved the Avengers contract up about 2 points in a week, which looks like news-driven flow more than a change in fundamentals.
For leverage traders, Doomsday is a low-priced contract whose payoff depends almost entirely on one data point: its 14-day domestic total. A 5.75-cent contract pays about 17x if it wins, and leverage magnifies that upside and the far more likely total loss in the same proportion.
Dune: Part Three, "Dunesday" and the screen-split question
Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Three (listed on the board under its working title, Dune: Messiah) opens the same day as Doomsday, December 18 in North America, with early screenings starting December 14. Its IMAX 70mm ticket sales sold out within minutes in April, and a second sale on August 18 crashed ticketing sites. The Dune contract trades at 0.05%. It faces the same 14-day calendar problem as Avengers, and the Dune franchise has never come close to a $958 million domestic total.
The same-day clash still matters for this market, though not for Dune's own chances. Dune: Part Three won a three-week IMAX exclusivity window in the US, so Doomsday will not play on US IMAX screens for its entire 2026 run. Disney is leaning on other premium formats instead, and it said about 70% of early Doomsday tickets were for its Infinity Vision showings. Premium screens drive the opening-weekend totals Avengers would need, and losing IMAX for the whole 14-day window pushes against the already thin Avengers tail.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping (November 20) is the other notable late release. The 2023 prequel The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes opened to about $44.6 million domestically, per The Numbers. Even optimistic estimates for this one put it nowhere near Spider-Man's total, and its 0.05% price reflects that.
The remaining catalyst calendar
Only a few dated events can still move this market:
- Weekly Box Office Mojo updates through November and December: Spider-Man's calendar total creeps up a little each week, raising the bar for Avengers by a small amount.
- November 20 - Sunrise on the Reaping opens: irrelevant to the crown, but it will shape late-November premium-screen availability.
- Early to mid December - final opening tracking for Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three: the biggest remaining information shock. A credible $350 million-plus domestic opening forecast would likely lift the Avengers tail. Tracking in the $260-300 million range would likely squeeze it lower.
- December 14 - Dune: Part Three early screenings begin.
- December 17-21 - Doomsday previews and opening weekend: the decisive data point. After opening weekend, the market will know almost exactly what daily average Avengers needs over December 22-31.
- Late December holiday weekdays: each daily actual narrows the remaining gap or confirms Spider-Man.
- Box Office Mojo's December 31 data, with a January 7, 2027 fallback deadline: the formal settlement trigger.
Bottom line: Spider-Man is the clear favorite, and the remaining risk is a two-week tail
Spider-Man: Brand New Day has already posted the year's biggest domestic calendar gross by a margin of more than $330 million: $958.5 million and counting. It also holds the all-time domestic opening and 10-day records. The Odyssey, Toy Story 5 and the rest of the field are mathematically out of reach, which is why they trade at 0.05%.
The live question is whether Avengers: Doomsday can do in 14 days what took Brand New Day itself more than six weeks. Prediction markets put that at 5.75%. Given that Brand New Day's record-setting pace reached about $655 million in its first 10 days, a sub-10% tail looks reasonable, and an argument can be made that it is generous. The case for paying for it rests on an unprecedented December release plus small settlement-process risk, not on any tracking that currently shows Doomsday near $958 million inside the calendar year.
Opening weekend on December 18-20 will decide most of this. Until then, traders using leverage on either side are mainly sizing how much of their capital to risk on a single two-week data window.
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