Scary Movie coming back in 2026 felt like a genuine surprise, mostly because nobody was asking for it. The franchise had been dormant for over a decade, and the horror landscape it used to parody has completely changed since then. Whatever they did with the new targets, audiences still showed up, which says something real about how much goodwill the original run still carries. $204 million is not a bad resurrection for a series most people assumed was finished. | © Paramount Pictures
Scream 7 had a rougher road to the screen than almost any other horror sequel in recent memory. Melissa Barrera was fired, Jenna Ortega walked, and the whole production looked like it might collapse before cameras rolled. What came out the other side was a movie leaning hard on Neve Campbell's return as the thing that holds it together. The nostalgia did enough work to get people back in seats, even if the knives felt a little duller this time. | © Paramount Pictures
Blades of the Guardians is a Chinese animated wuxia film based on the manga by Xu Xianzhe, following a wandering escort guard across a violent and beautifully rendered ancient China. The action is fast and the fights hit harder than most live-action movies dare to. What carries it globally is the visual style, which owes more to ink painting than anything coming out of Hollywood right now. $215 million worldwide for an animated Chinese film without a major Western IP behind it is not a small number. | © Well Go USA Entertainment
Wuthering Heights brings Emily Brontë's raw, obsessive love story back to the screen with a new cast and a fresh visual approach. The source material has always been more unsettling than romantic, and a good adaptation leans into that. Heathcliff is not a brooding dream. He is a man who destroys everything he touches, and watching that unfold is what keeps people coming back to this story across every generation. | © Focus Features
Dear You keeps things restrained, built around correspondence, memory, and the emotional distance between people who can’t quite let go. It’s a film that lives in pauses and unfinished sentences, where the weight comes from what’s left unsaid rather than big dramatic turns. The romance unfolds slowly, almost hesitantly, which only makes the payoff feel more personal when it lands. It found its audience quietly, the kind of word-of-mouth success that grows week by week rather than exploding overnight. | © Alibaba Pictures
The Backrooms takes the internet's most unsettling liminal space mythology and commits to it as a full feature film. Endless yellow hallways, humming fluorescent lights, and that specific dread of being somewhere that should not exist. What made the original viral videos so effective was the simplicity, and the movie is smart enough not to bury that under too much explanation. Crossing $300 million proves the creepypasta generation grew up and bought tickets. | © Paramount Pictures
Obsession leans into tension rather than spectacle, building its momentum through intimacy, control, and the slow collapse of boundaries between attraction and danger. It’s less about twists and more about pressure — the kind that builds quietly until every interaction feels loaded. Performances do a lot of the heavy lifting here, turning small moments into something unsettlingly unpredictable. Audiences turned up for the thriller promise and stayed for how uncomfortably close it gets to real emotional extremes. | © Focus Features
Toy Story 5 takes place after Andy's toys have fully settled into Bonnie's world, then pulls the rug out when Bonnie starts leaving them behind. Woody is gone, and the film leans into what that absence costs the group that built itself around him. Pixar does not soften the edges here. The result is quieter and stranger than most people expected from a fifth installment. | © Walt Disney Pictures
Hoppers brings Pixar back into original territory with a concept that sounds playful on paper and surprisingly emotional in execution. At its core, it plays with identity and perspective, using its sci-fi setup to ask what it actually means to be something else in the natural world. The humor stays light, but there’s an undercurrent of curiosity that keeps it grounded even when things get wildly imaginative. Families showed up in force, drawn by the premise alone, and it quickly became one of the studio’s standout releases of the year. | © Walt Disney Pictures
Pegasus 3 pushes the franchise into full-blown spectacle mode, doubling down on speed, scale, and the mythic tone that made the earlier films such a regional powerhouse. This time, the story leans even harder into rivalry and legacy, turning its aerial set pieces into something closer to mythology than racing. It’s the kind of sequel built for maximum screen size and maximum noise, where subtlety is never really the point. By the end of its run, it had firmly cemented the saga as a box office force that refuses to slow down. | © CMC Pictures
The Devil Wears Prada 2 picks up with Andy back in Miranda's orbit, and somehow that tension still crackles like it never left. Meryl Streep doing cold, controlled, and quietly devastating is something audiences clearly never tired of. Nearly twenty years later, the original had become a comfort watch for millions, which made the sequel feel less like a cash grab and more like a reunion people actually wanted. That goodwill carried it past $677 million without much resistance. | © Walt Disney Pictures
Project Hail Mary puts a lone astronaut in deep space with no memory of how he got there. Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, and the film leans hard into the science without ever losing the warmth underneath it. The friendship that develops in the second half is the kind of thing you don't see coming and can't stop thinking about after. | © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Michael lands its punches hardest when it leans into the contradictions. Antoine Fuqua directs Jaafar Jackson playing his own uncle, which is either the most logical casting choice imaginable or the strangest, depending on how you feel about the whole thing. The film does not shy away from the abuse, the surgeries, the accusations, or the reinvention. What it gives you is a portrait of someone who kept getting bigger while the person underneath got harder to find. | © Universal Pictures
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie takes Mario off the ground and into deep space, leaning hard into the cosmic weirdness that made the game unforgettable. Gravity-flipping planetoids, orchestral music that hits like a wave, and Rosalina finally getting the big-screen moment fans have wanted for years. Nintendo and Illumination clearly trusted the source material this time instead of softening it. The result crossed a billion dollars, which tells you everything about how that bet paid off. | © Universal Pictures
We're only partway through 2026, but the year has already minted some massive blockbusters at the global box office. From sequels to surprise breakouts, these are the films packing theaters and racking up the biggest numbers so far. Here are the 15 highest-grossing movies of 2026 to date.
