Welcome to Week 19 of the Knock on Wood Movie Fantasy League dispatch. Every week (more or less), we’ll bring you a recap of the past weekend’s box office, alongside an overview of the new release films and an updated leaderboard, complete with full teams and points!
This week’s domestic box office is down 54% from last week, but that’s not a surprise – it was the biggest weekend in theatrical history, after all! Spider-Man continued to web the competition, swinging in with $144 million, which is over 72% of the total box office tally. It cruised past $1 billion worldwide, and will likely steamroll past the $2 billion milestone next weekend. The Odyssey came in at a low #2 with $31 million, and everything below (in the entire box office!) cumulatively made less than $25 million. Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday might still take the cake, but if there’s any question about which movies are claiming the 2026 box office crown, look no further. They’re here, and they’re not slowing down anytime soon.
The weekend’s biggest new release is One Night Only, the “sex purge movie” that has spawned a thousand memes and inspired marvelously fun internet debates. Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro star as two New Yorkers trying to figure their shit out on the one night a year single people are legally allowed to have sex, as decreed by a strange dystopian US government. Even at #3 in the box office, it only made $5.5 million – the moviegoing crowds only had room for Spider-Man and The Odyssey this weekend, and everything else (including the new releases) was relegated to the scraps. Still, studio rom-coms, even with a bizarre lack of worldbuilding, are rare commodities these days, and we should appreciate whichever ones we get…
Super Troopers 3 is also out this week (completing the trilogy that began 25 years ago), and it slotted nicely into the #4 spot, just below Toy Story 5. Jane Schoenbrun’s queer horror homage Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is also out in only five theaters, and that is by far my favorite new release of the weekend. It made under $1 million and couldn’t crack the Top Ten, but with an expanded rollout in the next few weeks (and the highest Rotten Tomatoes score for a horror movie this year), it’s sure to make a bigger bloody cultural splash. If it comes near you, see it!
Also out this week (but undated by the start of the League) is Tony, the refreshingly inspired biopic of a young, brash Anthony Bourdain from filmmaker Matt Johnson, only in six theaters this week before an expansion on August 21; Cookie Queens, an endearing documentary about Girl Scout cookie season; Namaslay, an independent self-styled “pyroclastic, genre-smashing horror satire” that is receiving a limited grassroots release; and Eli Roth’s reprehensible Ice Cream Man…the less said about that one, the better.
With the addition of the critical scores combined with this weekend’s box office, Spider-Man: Brand New Day has officially become the highest scorer in the entire League, totaling over 1000 points. Its IMDb rating was particularly helpful, boosting it by 50 points.
Check out our leaderboard here. For the most up-to-date scoring on each movie, check out this spreadsheet. Additionally, I’ve made a Letterboxd list of every film chosen by our players for the Fantasy League. You can view that anytime here.
Next week, summer ends on Oak Street (according to the tagline for David Robert Mitchell’s mysterious sci-fi thriller The End of Oak Street) with a spectacular Jurassic bang, and Matthew McConaughey seeks revenge in the neo-western The Rivals of Amziah King.
As a reminder, submissions for the MFL are now closed. Thank you all for playing, and I am very much looking forward to seeing the board change every which way over the next few months! Please let us know if you have any feedback, and don’t forget to come back here next week for a recap and the updated leaderboard!
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