📈 Studio Market Share Tracker: Who's Winning the Box Office

Disney's 2025 number: $6.58 billion worldwide, 27.5% of the US/Canada box office. Warner Bros. finished second at $4.4 billion and 13%, not particularly close. Nobody else cracked double-digit share. That's the whole studio year in one paragraph.

Data as of July 19, 2026.

The 2025 studio rankings

Number that matters: 51%. That's how much of Disney's entire worldwide gross came from three movies: Zootopia 2, Lilo & Stitch, and Avatar: Fire and Ash. Not a deep slate. Three swings, three connects.

My call: Disney repeats at #1 in 2026. Toy Story 5 is already past $404 million domestic, ahead of the 2026 box office field before the fall corridor even opens.

Run the arithmetic on that gap and it gets more specific than "$2.2 billion." Worldwide, Disney's total was 1.5 times Warner's. In the US/Canada market specifically, Disney's share was more than double Warner's: 27.5 points to 13. Whatever ground Warner is making up, it's making it up overseas, not at home.

Disney's three-film core

Add those three percentages and you land on 51% — a majority of a $6.58 billion year, sourced from a franchise sequel, a live-action remake, and a Cameron sequel four years removed from its predecessor. I'd call that a diversified bet if the three films weren't all built on 15-to-30-year-old IP. They're proven properties, executed well, released in the same twelve months. That's a strategy, not luck. It's the same one that's put Disney on top nine of the last ten years. For the full run, every year Disney's made this list, the Disney studio history has the complete ledger.

Pull Zootopia 2 out of the year entirely and Disney's total drops to $5.10 billion. Still ahead of Warner's $4.4 billion — but by $700 million, not $2.18 billion. One animated sequel is responsible for close to two-thirds of Disney's entire margin over its nearest competitor. That's the catch hiding inside "redundant dominance": the redundancy is real, but it isn't evenly distributed. Lilo & Stitch and Avatar: Fire and Ash matter. Zootopia 2 is load-bearing.

Compare that to how Marvel built its dominance in the 2010s: one factory, one house style, a new release every few months. Disney's 2025 looks structurally different. Three unrelated brands, each clearing tentpole numbers on its own. If one of the three had underperformed, Disney still finishes #1 comfortably on the other two plus everything else. That's redundant dominance, not fragile dominance, and it's the real story behind the $2.18 billion gap. The Zootopia 2 math above is the asterisk on it.

What "US/Canada market share" actually measures

Worldwide box office and US/Canada market share aren't the same measurement, and conflating them is the easiest way to misread a table like this one. Disney's $6.58 billion is a global dollar total. Its 27.5% is a domestic percentage: Disney's US/Canada gross divided by the entire US/Canada industry's gross for the year, not divided by Disney's own worldwide number. A studio can lead one column and trail the other in a given year. Disney didn't, in 2025, but the two metrics answer different questions, and most rankings that quote both numbers side by side never say so. (For how these totals get compiled and reported in the first place, see how box office numbers are calculated.)

The international split nobody's tallying

Break Disney's $6.58 billion into its two halves and you get roughly $4.08 billion overseas against $2.49 billion domestic — call it a 62/38 international-to-domestic split. That's heavier overseas than I'd have guessed before running the math. Zootopia 2 and Lilo & Stitch are both built for family audiences that travel in dubbed markets; Avatar has over-indexed overseas since the 2009 original. None of that shows in a single worldwide total. It only shows once you split the number in half, which most annual studio roundups don't bother doing.

Why a $2.18 billion gap is normal (and also isn't)

Is a spread that size unusual for a #1-vs-#2 studio finish? Not historically. Concentration at the top is the rule in this business, not the exception — a handful of releases decide most studios' entire year. What's unusual here is the mechanism. Most #1 finishes ride one outlier: a Barbie, a single Avatar sequel, one Marvel event picture carrying a thin year around it. Disney's 2025 didn't need an outlier. It had three films doing outlier-level business at the same time, while Warner simply didn't field anything in that weight class. I'll take three independent hits over one lucky outlier every time. One bad trailer doesn't sink an entire year that way.

What to watch in 2026

Toy Story 5's $404 million domestic already leads the year. Disney/Pixar looks built to defend the top spot, and whatever Avengers: Doomsday contributes once it lands will matter more than any single Warner counter-punch. A full 2026 verdict isn't possible until the year closes; studios that look untouchable in July have blown leads before. Line Zootopia 2's 2025 run up against Universal's animation slate the same year and the gap gets starker than the raw studio totals suggest; the Disney-vs-Universal breakdown has that comparison. For weekly movement between now and the next full-year tally, the weekend box office results track it frame by frame.

Methodology

Figures reflect Disney's own reported 2025 results and industry studio-ranking coverage (Screen International, Statista, CNBC), cross-referenced for consistency. Percentages and per-film share figures above are calculated directly from those same reported totals. Full-year 2026 studio rankings post once the year's box office data is final; until then, 2025 is the baseline comparison. Photo: Walt Disney Studios Casting Building, Burbank, CA (HABS documentation), public domain via Wikimedia Commons.