Holding the Throne: The Films That Stayed a Box-Office Phenomenon Two Weeks Running (2006–2026)

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A box-office Phenomenon — a film taking 61.8% or more of an entire week’s U.S. box office — is rare enough. Doing it two weeks running is almost unheard of. In twenty-one years, only nine films have cleared the bar — holding the throne two consecutive weeks while grossing enough to count as an event at all. Two pandemic-era titles briefly reached the same share on near-empty theaters, but neither came close to the index’s $61.8M floor, so they don’t make the list. Two of the nine arrived in 2026.

The nine that truly held it

The list is almost entirely superhero and event-scale spectacle. Avatar: The Way of Water is the only film of the era to hold three straight weeks above the line. And 2026 just added two more: Spider-Man: Brand New Day (80.0% → 70.0%) and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (65.1% → 61.8%). Note the counter-intuitive detail: the biggest opening doesn’t guarantee the longest hold — Top Gun: Maverick actually rose in week two.

USA Times Billion-Dollar Club: one S2 star per $1 billion in worldwide gross (floor). Two stars = crossed $2B.

Film	Year	Weeks held	Weekly share run
Avatar: The Way of Water	2022	3	83.7% → 65.1% → 64.4%
Spider-Man: Brand New Day · 2026	2026	2	80.0% → 70.0%
Avengers: Endgame	2019	2	88.3% → 72.4%
Avengers: Infinity War	2018	2	81.3% → 65.8%
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness	2022	2	83.3% → 66.1%
The Batman	2022	2	79.8% → 64.9%
Inside Out 2	2024	2	73.3% → 67.4%
Top Gun: Maverick	2022	2	72.3% → 74.4%
The Odyssey · 2026	2026	2	65.1% → 61.8%

The droughts, then the surge

Fifteen of the twenty-one years from 2006 to 2026 produced no sustained Phenomenon at all. Then 2022 produced four in a single year — Avatar, Doctor Strange, The Batman and Top Gun: Maverick — and 2026 has already produced two before the year is out. The rarest event in modern cinema is starting to cluster.

The $61.8M floor

To be counted at all, the index requires a film to gross at least $61.8M worldwide in its lifetime — 0.618 × $100M, keeping the whole system on the golden ratio. That one rule quietly disqualifies the pandemic’s strangest chapter. In 2020, with theaters shuttered and only drive-ins open, a micro-budget horror film called The Wretched sat at #1 for five weeks, its share of the near-empty market climbing to a surreal 98.8% — on a lifetime gross of roughly $250,000. A re-release, Phoenix, Oregon, did the same for two. They didn’t dominate the box office so much as outlast its collapse, and at a fraction of a percent of the floor, the index no longer counts them.

What it means

Two-week box-office domination went from impossible to recurring in the span of a few years. The absence in 2006–2017 wasn’t for lack of hits; none could hold the whole market a second week because the market was shared. What changed is concentration: a shrinking set of mega-events now command entire weeks, back to back, while everything around them is starved. The throne used to be a chair nobody could keep. Now a few franchises sit in it for a month — and 2026 is on pace to be the most crowded reign yet.

Method: weekly shares are the #1 film’s take of total U.S. box office that week (Box Office Mojo; The Numbers fallback). A sustained Phenomenon is the same film at 61.8%+ as the week’s #1 in 2+ consecutive weeks, across the complete 2006–2025 index plus 2026 to date.