Spider-Man. Jurassic Park. Despicable Me. Moviegoers heading to air-conditioned theaters during the Fourth of July holiday can rely on seeing one of those Sony, Universal or Illumination franchises on the marquee over the past 25 years. And count on Despicable spinoff Minions & Monsters to put up big numbers for 5-day grosses this year, given the Toy Story-levels of goodwill for that series.
But when zeroing in on the question of single-day grosses (i.e. receipts from the July 4 day itself) there’s a leader that happens to be none of the above. It’s also a title that launched a big-screen franchise that keeps rumbling on in theaters since it arrived 19 years ago in July. Fittingly for the holiday, it’s also a Michael Bay movie. Paramount and Hasbro’s Transformers (2007), starring Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, still leads the way among top-grossing titles on the July 4 holiday with $29 million for the day, not adjusted for inflation. As per Rentrak figures prepared for The Hollywood Reporter, here are the other top titles:
Browsing the single-day grosses, a few details stand out: There’s only a few non-sequels on the list (if we’re including Transformers, which is pre-branded IP and did hit the big screen in 1986 in animated form). Disney hasn’t leveraged the release frame for its tentpoles in the same way that Sony, Universal and Paramount have. Will Smith’s star power propelled non-sequel superhero title Hancock and the Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise pairing helped push War of the Worlds into tentpole territory. There’s also one indie, Sound of Freedom, which put Angel Studios on the map back when it broke out just a few years ago in 2023.
There’s many ways to slice the numbers for the July 4 frame beyond single-day. There’s 6-day grosses, where 2004’s Tobey Maguire actioner Spider-Man 2 once held the all-time record with a haul of $180 million, besting then-leaders The Matrix: Reloaded and the first Spider-Man big screen foray. Or you could stack individual movies together to determine the busiest year for moviegoers at the July 4 holiday weekend through history. That would be 2013, which saw the Minions run wild as Despicable Me 2 opened and Friday-Sunday saw all movies gross a combined $230.5 million.
Or, another way to take a longer view than the typical Friday-Sunday box office frame is to look at the major features that have bet on a 5-day opening from Wednesday-Sunday, with July 4 falling somewhere in those days. Here’s how that picture looks for those Wednesday openers:
By this measure, the third installment in the Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson-led Twilight series, Eclipse, takes the crown for the 5-day Wednesday openers. As Rentrak would probably appreciate noting, Spider-Man: Far From Home bowed on Tuesday, July 2 in 2019 to $39 million, before falling to $27.5 million on the 3rd and $25.7 million on the Fourth of July en route to a Tuesday-Sunday of $185 million for the Tom Holland starrer. And the Andrew Garfield-led Amazing Spider-Man also bowed on a Tuesday in 2012 to $35 million. So titles like those aren’t accounted for in the Wednesday-Sunday tallies. There’s similar sorts of caveats all the way around when looking at holiday box office frames. The overall July 4 single-day leader, Transformers, also opened on a Tuesday, July 3 in 2007.