Hollywood's summer box office is glowing, but the numbers come with startling caveats

Clockwise from top left: Toy Story 5 , Spider-Man: Brand New Day, The Odyssey and Backrooms . Disney/Pixar; Marvel/Sony Pictures; Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures; A24 hide caption

Summer blockbusters — including the smash hits Spider Man: Brand New Day, and Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey — have busted plenty of blocks this year. American cineplexes are on track to rake in more dollars than they have in a decade, a gratifying outcome after years of losing audiences to streaming.

And while the big box office numbers come with equally big caveats, it's reasonable to revel in the good news first. With Spidey entertaining superhero fans, the Michael Jackson biopic Michael capturing the pop music crowd, The Odyssey for folks who like epics, The Devil Wears Prada 2 for fashionistas, and Toy Story 5 for kids, Hollywood has managed to have something for everyone this summer.

It even found room for a couple of unexpected, low-budget thrillers from YouTube creators — Obsession and Backrooms — that together added $460 million dollars to the North American box-office pot.

All of which has theater owners cheering, and Tinseltown's trade papers buzzing about what's shaping up to be a $4.5 billion summer, easily topping not just the Barbenheimer summer of 2023 but also the Lion King/Avengers: Endgame summer of 2019. (In Hollywood, "summer" means the first Friday in May through Labor Day.)

This is great news for a film industry that seemed to lose its way when the pandemic accelerated the growth of streaming services six years ago. For a few months in 2020, when theaters shut down entirely, movie studios became reluctant-but-active participants in the weaning of audiences away from the habit of attending movies in cinemas.

Disney sent its Pixar attractions, reliably successful in theaters, straight to Disney+, Warner Bros. made Dune , its most promising blockbuster, available for home viewing on HBO Max the same day it opened in more than 4,000 theaters. Other studios delayed openings or sent films straight to streaming services that would normally have gone first to theaters.

And movie patrons, once they had been trained to look for the latest movies in their living rooms, had to be strenuously wooed back to cinemas with films that were spectacle-oriented, star-studded, and in every sense bigger than what was available at home.