On the Sunday night of The Odyssey's opening weekend, veteran box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian secured tickets to a packed 70mm screening at Grauman's Chinese Theatre—the format director Christopher Nolan had insisted the film be experienced in. Before the feature began, a title card appeared on screen from Denis Villeneuve, thanking Nolan for allowing audiences a glimpse of four minutes of exclusive footage from December's highly anticipated Dune: Part Three.

"The audience erupted," Dergarabedian recalled. "That was mind-blowing."

He had already seen The Odyssey at its first showing the prior Thursday, but returned for a second viewing that Sunday. "That's a lot of hours," he said, noting he might yet see it again. But the scene at Grauman's—the 70mm presentation, the Villeneuve title card, the crowd's electric response—crystallized something he had been watching build throughout the season.

"This is a memory moment," he said. "A touchstone moment."

Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends at Rentrak and a decades-long box office analyst, has witnessed numerous summer cycles. He covered the milestone releases of both Jurassic Park in 1993 and Avengers: Endgame in 2019.

"I've seen it all," he told Fortune. "And this year—between the unexpected indie surprises and then the blockbuster success—there's an incredible mix of films." With Spider-Man: Brand New Day set to open even bigger on July 31, tracking toward $200 million to $250 million domestically, he sees a boom with considerable runway ahead.

The purest statistical milestone

For Dergarabedian, the most telling number was not The Odyssey's opening weekend—though that was undeniably a blockbuster result, cementing Nolan's standing as one of the few directors capable of opening an R-rated, nearly three-hour original epic at scale. What mattered most was what happened the following weekend.

Studio estimates on Sunday morning placed The Odyssey's second-weekend drop at roughly 30%, with approximately $87 million in ticket sales. As final figures arrived, that number rose to $90 million—tightening the decline to about 27%.

"That's nothing for a movie that opened that big," Dergarabedian said, explaining that major tentpoles routinely drop 50% or more in their second frames. This kind of hold places The Odyssey in the same conversation as Top Gun: Maverick and Obsession in terms of theatrical legs. The film is already approaching $700 million globally and climbing; by the end of the weekend, Dergarabedian expects it to be pushing $800 million.

"They're not gonna let that thing leave theaters until it hits $1 billion," he said.

He attributed the hold to "word of mouth doing the heavy lifting"—audiences reading about the film's success and not wanting to miss out, "just like appointment television used to be." The FOMO factor is genuine for theatrical releases this year, he concluded.

"People were going out on Sunday night [to see this]," he said. "That's a real thing."

The observation carries a different resonance in 2026 than it would have a decade earlier. For roughly 20 years, cultural prestige migrated steadily from the multiplex to the living room. The Sopranos and Breaking Bad established television as the home of water-cooler moments; the streaming era reinforced that logic until the sheer volume of prestige content made appointment viewing nearly impossible. There was too much to track, and all of it was available on demand.

The Odyssey's second-weekend hold represents a television-era metric applied to cinema—what happens when audiences feel they will be excluded from a cultural conversation unless they show up. Appointment culture has gone, as Dergarabedian put it, "back to the future": the multiplex.

Spider-Man as pressure point

If The Odyssey lit the fuse, Spider-Man represents the looming detonation. Brand New Day does not open until July 31, but tracking places it in the $230 million to $250 million range domestically, which would mark the biggest opening weekend of 2026. Dergarabedian has seen enough to offer a prediction: "Spider-Man's gonna blow the doors off."

What makes the matchup unusual is its intimacy. Zendaya, Tom Holland, and Jon Bernthal all appear in both The Odyssey and Brand New Day, creating a back-to-back star run that Dergarabedian likened to Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, or Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. He expects audiences to embrace the trio.

"I think there's going to be people bragging about seeing both," he said. (Zendaya has an outside chance to repeat the phenomenon this December. If she appears in the next Avengers film, she will effectively open against herself on the same day as Dune: Part Three.)

Rather than a rivalry, Dergarabedian argued for a Barbenheimer-like cultural phenomenon in the making, with The Odyssey being the best thing that could have happened to Spider-Man. The two films are "complementary and additive," he said—evidence that the theatrical market can sustain both a superhero tentpole and a Nolan epic simultaneously without cannibalizing each other's audience. He pushed back against the "superhero fatigue" narrative that has circulated since the MCU's post-Endgame stumbles.

"Clearly, if you put all superhero movies into one bucket, that's a big mistake," he said. "It's not superhero fatigue. It's bad marketing or bad movie fatigue." He acknowledged Supergirl's struggles but said they do not predict Spider-Man's ceiling.

The eclectic slate

The twin pillars of the Odyssey-Spider-Man showdown sit atop a summer that was already outperforming expectations before either film opened. The Devil Wears Prada 2 kicked off the season by outperforming last year's Marvel entry, Thunderbolts. Lower-budget genre films—Backrooms, Obsession, and Iron Lung, many from creators with YouTube and small-screen pedigrees—have broken through with younger audiences. Animated and family titles have rounded out the slate. Even franchise disappointments like Moana and Supergirl could not drag the aggregate down; Dergarabedian cited Moana as having long legs in its own right.

"Literally, at the multiplex, if you can't find a movie for everyone, you're not looking," Dergarabedian said. He believes the eclectic mix is drawing multiple demographics simultaneously—families, older moviegoers who remember 70mm roadshows, and Gen Z audiences who were expected to remain permanently attached to their phones.

The numbers support that observation. The 2026 domestic summer box office crossed $3 billion by late July, leaving roughly a $1 billion gap to reach the $4 billion seasonal benchmark that once defined a healthy summer. Dergarabedian said that target could be within reach, especially if Spider-Man opens big and August delivers—a $1 billion August has occurred only twice. For the full year, he sees a plausible path to the first $10 billion year since before the pandemic. Pre-COVID, the benchmark was $11 billion domestically; since 2020, the industry has cleared $9 billion only twice.

Reaching $10 billion for the full year, up from $2.3 billion—or "almost zero"—in 2020, would be "nothing short of remarkable" for the longtime box office watcher.

Gen Z, 'macramé,' and the analog appeal

Part of what is driving those numbers, in Dergarabedian's telling, is a demographic surprise. Gen Z now accounts for close to 40% of the moviegoing audience in North America—a cohort widely assumed to be lost to small screens. A 2026 Fandango survey found that 87% of Gen Z respondents had seen at least one film in a theater in the past year—outpacing millennials—and they average around seven annual trips.

"Gen Z are embracing cassettes, handcrafted… macramé," Dergarabedian said, pointing to the cohort's growing affinity for analog experiences. The same impulse driving vinyl and thrift culture manifests in their appreciation for films that feel materially crafted, he argued—citing Nolan's refusal to use generative AI, his commitment to shooting on film, and his insistence on practical effects. In Dergarabedian's shorthand, Nolan is making "handcrafted" films that resonate with a generation raised on algorithmic feeds and increasingly drawn to experiences that feel like deliberate choices.

He noted the irony that the unexpected hits boosting the box office often originate in user-generated content. "Small-screen creators are helping to power a big-screen moment," he said. Gen Z directors and storytellers who built followings on YouTube have shepherded those audiences into multiplexes. The Gen Z demographic turnout for Backrooms and Obsession is stronger than for The Odyssey, his data shows, with younger viewers showing up for their discoveries alongside established franchises.

A memory moment in physical form

The Odyssey has given this experience tangible form as well. The first narrative feature shot entirely on IMAX cameras, its 70mm runs have been marketed as events in themselves. At Grauman's Chinese Theatre and other IMAX venues, audiences at designated Sunday screenings receive physical strips of 70mm film—a giveaway IMAX has promoted as exclusive to those showings. Within days of the promotion's launch, Odyssey film strips appeared on resale sites for dozens of dollars apiece.

"This is a moment where people are keeping their ticket stubs," Dergarabedian said, refusing to let the experience dissolve into a streaming queue. He traced that impulse back decades, recalling seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey at Hollywood's iconic—and soon to reopen—Cinerama Dome in 1968. The parallels for him are not about plot but about ritual: the sense that how and where you see a film becomes part of what it means.

That logic extends to the air conditioning. Much of North America has been under intense heat advisories this summer; attendance in Europe rose 50% during one stretch of extreme heat as audiences sought cooled auditoriums. Dergarabedian is careful not to draw a direct line to the Great Depression, but he sees continuity in how theaters function when the outside world becomes difficult to bear. Movie houses were among the first public spaces to install modern air conditioning, and they marketed "refrigerated air" as aggressively as they advertised their films.

"Let's not forget how important air conditioning is," he said. "Back in the day, movies would advertise air conditioning." The dark, cool auditorium is once again, in his phrase, "shelter from the storm."

"It's the one place you can go, the movie theater, and leave your troubles at the door," he said. "If you are appropriately comporting yourself, you are off for two hours."

Monoculture's return, and a BMW

Earlier this summer, Dergarabedian noticed attention splitting between two stories: the FIFA World Cup and The Odyssey's rollout. In his mind, that division is significant—evidence that a movie can still compete with global sports for top-of-mind cultural status. Fortune asked him: Is the monoculture coming back?

"It is. I actually love it," he responded.

He illustrated the point with a personal anecdote. Upon starting his car, an ad appeared on his BMW screen: a clapper board, then Spider-Man swinging toward a BMW vehicle in animation, the BMW logo materializing at the end. The surround sound in the car, he said, was remarkable. He posted the experience to X, where reactions were divided. But the image stayed with him—Spider-Man marketing appearing through his car's dormant apps while the vehicle sat waiting.

#SpiderMan is spinning a bold marketing web & I was trapped in it! — this interactive promo unexpectedly popped up on my #BMW screen this morning. With all signs pointing to the biggest opening weekend of the year thus far, @SonyPictures / @MarvelStudios is leveraging automotive… pic.twitter.com/f6fpy85hEf — Paul Dergarabedian (@PDergarabedian) July 28, 2026

Doug Shapiro, a media innovation strategist who writes the media strategy newsletter The Mediator and serves as senior advisor at Boston Consulting Group, would recognize what Dergarabedian witnessed. He said the monoculture may indeed be returning, but offered a very different—and distinctly 21st-century—economic explanation.

"As content proliferates, consumer price sensitivity goes up, willingness-to-pay goes down," Shapiro told Fortune, "and it becomes necessary to monetize content some other way." His reading of the box office revival is cooler than Dergarabedian's.

"It's a great year in dollars, but not in habits," he said. Normalized for inflation and population growth, ticket sales per capita remain dramatically below levels from a decade ago. What has changed is the threshold for when consumers are willing to leave the couch.

In streaming, Shapiro sees the same dynamic playing out from the opposite side of the economics. In the first quarter of 2026, 60% of premium streaming gross subscriber additions chose ad-supported tiers, according to Antenna. FAST services like Roku Channel and Tubi are growing their share of viewing time. Disney+ is considering a free tier; Paramount+ is moving more content outside the paywall; Netflix has begun publicly exploring a no-cost ad-supported option in certain markets. The recently struck Peacock-YouTube deal—under which Peacock is bundled into YouTube Premium at what Shapiro estimates as a steep wholesale discount—is, in his view, a wager that advertising revenue and lower churn will offset cannibalized subscription income.

The mechanism driving both trends is identical: as free content proliferates, consumers become more selective about what they will pay for, and that selection must feel unmissable. Shapiro's analogy is mobile gaming: AAA console titles cost hundreds of millions to produce and charge the consumer directly, while mobile games cost orders of magnitude less and are almost entirely free. As AI drives down content production costs, more material will flood the market at zero marginal price.

"Most content will become top-of-funnel for something else," Shapiro has written. When content shifts from profit center to cost center, most media companies will struggle to adapt.

Taken together, the two trends describe a transformation still in motion. After decades of prestige content residing on the small screen, that model is fragmenting under streaming's shift toward free and ad-supported formats, structurally vacating the premium tier. The unmissable experience—the thing worth showing up for, worth saving the ticket stub from—migrates back to wherever scarcity lives. In the mid-2020s, that place is the multiplex—with Spider-Man swinging across your BMW screen as well.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.