A24 beat Warner Bros this summer by less than the rounding in its own market share

The line going round this week is that A24 outgrossed Warner Bros. and Paramount over summer 2026 — a first for an independent distributor. The line is true. Almost everything printed next to it is off.

Start with the share table. Across 1 May to 7 September, the reported ladder runs:

• Universal — $1.23 billion
• Disney — $1.034 billion
• Sony — $1.0 billion
• Lionsgate — $270 million
• A24 — $244 million
• Warner Bros. — $239.3 million
• Paramount — $219.8 million

A24 is credited with 5.5 per cent of the summer, Warner with about 5 and Paramount with about 4.5. Two of those three check out.

Only A24's percentage fails to reconcile

The same coverage gives the summer domestic total as a record $4.76 billion. Run the division:

• Warner: $239.3m ÷ $4.76bn = 5.03 per cent. The stated "5 per cent" holds.
• Paramount: $219.8m ÷ $4.76bn = 4.62 per cent. The stated "4.5 per cent" holds.
• A24: $244m ÷ $4.76bn = 5.13 per cent. The stated 5.5 per cent does not.

Reverse it and the mismatch is clearer. For $244 million to be 5.5 per cent, the summer total would have to be $4.436 billion. A second version of the same table gives A24 $237 million, which implies $4.309 billion. And 5.5 per cent of the actual $4.76 billion would be $261.8 million — roughly $18 million more than A24 grossed.

One number in that table came from a different denominator, and it is the only number the headline depends on.

The margin is smaller than the rounding

A24 beat Warner Bros. by $4.7 million — 1.96 per cent. It beat Paramount by $24.2 million. Rounding Warner's 5.03 to "about 5" and A24's 5.13 to "5.5" makes a two-per-cent gap look like half a percentage point of market share, which is ten times the real distance.

And there is a name above A24 on the same list. Lionsgate finished the summer at $270 million, $26 million ahead. Lionsgate is not one of the Big Five either. So "the first time an independent distributor has ended a summer ahead of a major" needs a careful reading of what counts as independent, and A24 was not even the highest-grossing non-major of the season it is being credited with winning.

Obsession is a Focus Features film and it out-grossed A24's entire slate

The $750,000 horror film that defined the summer — Curry Barker's Obsession, $263,451,715 domestic and around $517 million worldwide — keeps appearing in the closing paragraphs of A24 victory-lap pieces. It is not an A24 release. Focus Features acquired it at Toronto for $14–15 million and distributed it domestically, with Universal handling international. Blumhouse, Capstone and Tea Shop produced.

To be precise about the error, because it matters: nobody actually wrote "A24's Obsession." One outlet mentions the film without naming a distributor, under an A24 headline, in an article tagged A24. That is adjacency, not misattribution. But the consequence is the same for a skim-reading audience, and the underlying fact is sharper than the framing: a single Focus Features film out-grossed A24's whole summer by $19 million.

What A24's summer actually was

• Backrooms opened to $81.4 million on 3,442 screens against a $10 million budget.
• Domestic $197.5 million — A24's first $100 million domestic release and now its highest-grossing film.
• Worldwide is listed as $393.2 million by one database and $402.5 million by another; the gap is entirely international reporting lag, not a dispute.
• Director Kane Parsons became the youngest filmmaker with a number one film in the United States, passing Josh Trank and Chronicle from 2012. His reported age at release is 20, which is attributed rather than documented.

One more number to watch

The summer record itself has two published versions: $4.76 billion in the Comscore-sourced consensus, and $4.67 billion in at least one major trade headline. Ninety million dollars, almost certainly a transposition, and every percentage above changes depending on which one you use.

What is still unknown

Which denominator produced the 5.5 per cent. Whether the window used for the share table is the same window that produced the $4.76 billion record. And what happens to the "first independent to beat a major" claim the moment anyone checks the row above A24's.

A24 had the best summer of its life and beat a major studio doing it. That is a real story. It did not need a percentage point that does not divide.