Most of the USA Times index is about domination — the weeks a single film swallows the box office whole. This story is about the opposite and rarer thing: the weeks when two films arrived at the top so evenly matched that they practically tied. In a market built for one winner, a genuine photo finish is a small miracle, and the closest of them came down to a margin thinner than a rounding error.
Two-tenths of a point
The tightest race in twenty years came in the summer of 2019, when Toy Story 4 edged Spider-Man: Far from Home by just 0.2 of a percentage point — 28.2% to 28.0% of the entire American box office. Two beloved franchise films, opening days apart, each commanding almost exactly the same slice of the market. For one week, the country’s moviegoing was split so cleanly down the middle that the “#1 movie in America” was, for all practical purposes, a coin flip.
| Year | Winner | Runner-up | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Toy Story 4 (28.2%) | Spider-Man: Far from Home (28.0%) | 0.2 pts |
| 2024 | Dune: Part Two (32.6%) | Kung Fu Panda 4 (31.9%) | 0.7 pts |
| 2023 | Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (34.7%) | Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (33.9%) | 0.8 pts |
| 2024 | Deadpool & Wolverine (33.0%) | It Ends with Us (31.8%) | 1.2 pts |
| 2009 | Angels & Demons (30.9%) | Star Trek (29.3%) | 1.6 pts |
| 2017 | The Boss Baby (28.4%) | Beauty and the Beast (26.7%) | 1.7 pts |
| 2019 | It: Chapter Two (32.7%) | Hustlers (30.5%) | 2.2 pts |
| 2024 | Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (30.9%) | Transformers One (27.8%) | 3.2 pts |
Counter-programming, done right
These near-ties are the fingerprint of successful counter-programming — the art of opening a film against a giant rather than fleeing it, by aiming at a different audience. The clearest modern example is the summer of 2024, when Deadpool & Wolverine and the romantic drama It Ends with Us ran nearly even by pulling from almost entirely separate crowds. Neither cannibalized the other; they simply divided the week between them. The same logic produced the dead heats between animated family films and action tentpoles that recur throughout the list.
Batmandir · The Circle Full access to theatres, museums & exhibitions. S2 · ongoing membership, without a Founder’s seat. Explore membership →There is a golden-ratio footnote worth a smile here. In the closest of these weeks, each film took a little more than a quarter of the market — and the two of them together often landed near the same 61.8% neighborhood that defines a single Geuse. In other words, some of these pairs jointly achieved what one film usually has to do alone: they owned the week. They just had to share the crown to do it.
Photo finishes like these run against the grain of everything else the index documents. The dominant trend is concentration — fewer films taking bigger bites, weeks belonging decisively to one giant. The two-way tie is the exception that proves how strong that rule has become: it takes a rare confluence of two strong films, two distinct audiences, and near-perfect timing to produce a week the market refuses to hand to a single winner. When it happens, it is worth savoring. In the modern box office, a fair fight is the unusual thing.
