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2026-08-07 00:20:51

The most interesting element in Meta's newly announced 'Muse Code' product isn't the product itself, it's the model. Not the AI model, which is an updated variant of their 'Muse Spark' (non-flagship), but the business model. Per The Wall Street Journal:

Meta’s Muse Code agent has two price tiers: one that’s the same as its general Muse Spark model and another that is less than one-10th the cost. To access the less-expensive tier, which costs 20 cents per million output tokens, users must agree to provide feedback to help improve the agent. Tokens are the basic unit of artificial-intelligence computing.

Yes, you read that correctly. If you opt-in to having your data used to improve the models, you get more than a 10x discount on using those models. Actually, depending on the token type, quite a bit more! If my math is right, it's a 75x discount on cached input tokens. That is... sort of wild.

And also sort of brilliant. As everyone knows, Meta is coming from behind in AI after having to restart their efforts. And the fruits of such labor have been pretty good to date, but also still not frontier-level. And there's some concern that they won't be able to get to frontier level because that line keeps moving, pushed by the incumbents, Anthropic and OpenAI. I mean, not only has xAI struggled to catch up even after billions spent, even Google is struggling to keep up.

Part of the issue is obviously that the leaders simply have so much more usage that they've reached a kind of virtuous cycle, not unlike Google did back in the day with Search. Microsoft and Yahoo poured billions into trying to compete, but they simply could never catch up (let alone make Google "dance").

What's one way to spur usage and try to break customers away from the leaders? Well, a better product can work. But beyond not being so simple, that often takes time, enough time that if it starts working, the incumbents are likely to copy you. So what's a better way? Price.

Mark Zuckerberg has made no secret of the fact that he plans to undercut those competitors to get back into the race. And given the pressure both Anthropic and OpenAI are under to show improvements in their economics as they angle to go public means that a full-on price war is going to be a problem for them. Meta, as an already public and profitable – well, at least before all that AI spend came along – company can afford to undercut, quite literally. And so their margins are Meta's opportunity.

But this is actually even more interesting than that relatively simple and straightforward playbook. Currently, many businesses are having the AI cost come-to-Jesus moment. This includes both small businesses and even Big Tech. Many are learning the hard way just how fast AI costs can spiral out of control.

As such, we're seeing a pivot in the messaging around AI for businesses from maximizing usage to cost controls. Microsoft is leading the charge here, but Meta is right there too. Sure, this is easier to do when you don't have an actual frontier model to sell, but that doesn't mean it's not a good angle. And while Microsoft is focused on being a router between any and all models (well, aside from maybe Google's) so customers can make up their own mind on costs, Meta is here with a new model – again, a new business model.

This also taps into yet one more element being talked up right now against the 'Big AI' incumbents: customer data. Palantir's Alex Karp is leading this charge, but Microsoft's Satya Nadella is right there with him. The argument is essentially: you'd be crazy to give your data over to the Big AI players. You're giving them free rein to use that data to train their models and you're paying them for the privilege!

Never mind that this is fairly overblown given that there are some data protections in place around training and data security and what not, but the high-level point remains. And it does lead to the flip-side question, the one Meta is now trying to answer: if you were paid, would you be open to letting one of the AI model makers use your data?

By "paid" I of course mean, given that massive discount on token usage. Still, it's an interesting trade off. It's one that many big businesses can't make for security reasons. But individuals and perhaps small businesses can probably live with such a choice. At least, that's what Meta is trying to find out.

And actually this also plays into yet another trend at the moment: the push to keep the Chinese "open" models in play in the US market. Why? Well aside from the whole open weight debate, they're simply so much cheaper to use at the moment. Granted, there are already signs this may be shifting. But probably not so far so as to be close to what the incumbents are charging for their frontier models. Per WSJ:

Claude Code and Codex come bundled in pricing plans that cost roughly $20 a month, with more expensive plans for increased usage. Exceeding the usage cap switches the user to pay-as-you-go rates. Rates per million output tokens range from $12 for GPT-5.6 Terra and $30 for Sol, with Claude Sonnet 5 at $10 and Opus 5 at $25.

Meta’s new coding agent is priced roughly on par with models from China, such as DeepSeek, that cost as little as 18 cents per million output tokens. OpenAI has also slashed prices on older models, such as GPT-5.6 Luna, which dropped from $6 to $1.20 per million tokens.

In other words, without the data opt-in Meta's Muse Spark price, at $1.25/million (input) and $4.25/million (output), is priced fairly in line with the American competition (again, for the non-"flagship" models), winning in some cases, losing in others. But where things get really interesting is with that data opt-in. Because now we're talking about $0.10/million (input) and $0.20/million (output). Yes, 10 and 20 cents. Again, that's roughly inline with DeepSeek (which is apparently in the process of raising their prices).

Granted, this is all to use Meta's new Muse Code product (and API), but there's no reason such prices – and the business model – couldn't translate to their broader Meta AI suite as well. The company is in the process of trying to figure out how best to monetize that element of the business. And if it does, will it pressure OpenAI and Anthropic to offer the same kind of deal?

That will be a painful pill to swallow as they're currently getting such data for "free" (but yes, there are ways to turn such rights off or restrict them). And yes, OpenAI does grant higher token limits if you remain opted-in to letting your data help train their models. But if Meta's token discount trade-off idea takes off...

You can't help but be reminded of the famous line around advertising-based business models, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." Here, the equivalent is sort of, "if you're not paying for the tokens, you are the tokens" – meaning, the trade-off to get those tokens for "free" (or insanely cheap) is that you're giving up your inputs to help train those models.

Of course, with many (but certainly not all) advertising-based models, "free" really is free. With AI, at least to date, free is free up until a certain point and/or capability, at which point you have to pay. If you squint, you can see a path forward here, where the data trade-off perhaps keeps and expands free usage, but also makes the paid tiers (or pay-as-you-go token usage) cheaper.

The issue is that whereas with advertising-based businesses, the advertisers are paying the companies, with AI data sharing, there is no actual money coming in from that alone. You can certainly argue there's still value in that training data, but just how much and if it will always be constant is a question.

And, of course, that alone wouldn't be enough to help AI companies actually pay for all of this. Again, there's no actual money coming in from those data rights, simply (potentially) less going out. So the model would have to be some sort of hybrid of data-supported free tier, data-supported paid tier, non-data-supported higher paid tier and perhaps even advertising to augment all of them.

I've been skeptical about advertising working well alongside at least our current AI products. And certainly that it could ever work as well as it does with Google Search and/or Facebook/Instagram. But what if it simply needs to augment that data "payment" and/or that actual payment to keep the whole system working in a sustainable manner?

You can see a path to such business models supporting the training and usage of such AI models. There would be trade-offs, for sure, but to truly scale AI, I'm not sure it's the worst idea. Let's see where it gets Meta.

2026-08-06 06:16:05

To me, at least until we have more actual reporting on the matter, the most interesting element of the Google bombshells today is simply the timing.

Just Jeff Dean leaving Google would obviously be a massive story by itself. I mean, he's been there almost 27 years. He was employee #30. As everything you read today will repeat, he was not just vital, but instrumental to a lot of what made – and makes – Google, well, Google. He's one of just two Google "Senior Fellows" – the company's highest technical honor.¹

Of course, the other Google Senior Fellow, Sanjay Ghemawat, is also leaving. Less well-known externally, but just as critical to the history of the company (and industry) for his technical work alongside Dean over decades, he's now joining his compatriot in forming a new startup.

So yes, just news of his departure alone would also be massive. But together, as Steven Levy so colorfully puts it: "that’s like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ditching the Rolling Stones to start a new band."

But those two are also joined by two other seemingly critical people to Google's AI efforts in Oriol Vinyals, the VP of research at DeepMind (and a technical lead for Gemini), and Quoc Le, a cofounder of Google Brain. Both were famously co-authors of a 2014 paper about scaling data for pre-training AI models – one of the key papers for the foundation of LLMs. The other co-author? One Ilya Sutskever.

[As an aside, sort of harsh that Sundar Pichai's note calls out Dean and Ghemawat but not Vinyals and Le? Then again, a lot of senior people have been leaving Google recently... Which leads me to...]

These departures were announced the same day that it was announced that Demis Hassabis would be stepping back – sorry "stepping up" or "aside"? – from his day-to-day work at DeepMind and into a more nebulous and higher minded role as Alphabet's Chief Scientist (though also still leading day-to-day at Isomorphic Labs, his other Alphabet project where he's CEO). I mean, what is going on at Google?!

The answer, at least in what you read right now, is perhaps less dire than it may seem on the surface. Dean and team, after collective decades on the inside, seemingly wanted to try their hands at a startup in the hottest space during the hottest time to have a startup: the AI Boom. And they seemingly picked the hottest current sector to start with: recursive self-improvement.

Yes, RSI is the new AGI, at least until RSI leads to AGI. Maybe. One day.

Anyway, on the DeepMind side, everything you read suggests that Hassabis had already effectively handed off day-to-day operations to DeepMind SVP Koray Kavukcuoglu. The fact that Kavukcuoglu was (and will remain) Google's 'Chief AI Architect' – a title which he may or may not have received when a certain Mark Zuckerberg came calling with a "Godfather" offer – lessens any blow to actual operations even further. He already reported directly to Pichai. He will continue to report to Pichai.

At the same time, he will not be the new CEO of DeepMind – because no one is getting that title. Because DeepMind is now clearly going to be run less autonomously and more as a part of Google's overall AI efforts.²

And that's probably a good thing, to be honest. Because after already having to course correct when they fell behind in AI once, well, it sure seemed to be happening again. The reporting there this time points less to timidity and more the usual corporate in-fighting and bureaucracy. Google always has too many cooks in the kitchen, but the actual chef can't seem to keep them corralled and on the mission to make the meal. Because there were also too many chefs! That's why we used to get a dozen chat apps, many of which are half-baked. And now a dozen AI coding projects. Hopefully Kavukcuoglu has the mandate to unite the cooks. And to get the meal prepped and plated.

We'll see. But what remains wild to me is that all of these departures were announced at once. Couldn't Google convince either Hassabis or Dean's team to wait a week or two to blunt the impact – certainly on the market, but also internally? Maybe something was leaking. Or maybe they decided that packaging them together would actually help soften the blow versus the alternative.

Because the alternative not only includes all of the above people, but also includes Noam Shazeer, unexpectedly jumping ship a couple months ago – to join OpenAI, no less. And John Jumper – another Nobel Prize winner at Google alongside Hassabis³ – john-jumping ship, to join Anthropic, no less. And Peter Norvig – Google’s head of research for the past 25 years – heading to Recursive Superintelligence, working on, you-know-what.

You add all this up and it doesn't look just like a trend, it looks like an exodus. A brain bleed the likes we perhaps have never seen in such a short amount of time.

So yeah, had we gotten hit with Dean, Ghemawat, Vinyals, and Le – followed by Hassabis (even yes, with him technically staying, but in a new, less day-to-day role), it would have actually seemed even more catastrophic. Like Google couldn't stop the bleeding. Better to rip the band-aid off, perhaps?

Regardless, it's still an optics nightmare. I mean, these people were just on stage together a couple months ago talking about the future of AI at Google as three of the four co-leads of Gemini. Now they're all gone – except for Kavukcuoglu.

Again, I think there's a way to read this that is not actually catastrophic and could actually end up as a good thing for the company and the AI efforts overall. Well, at least in so far as you think the need to productize and commercialize AI is vital to Google right now, with research and a push beyond LLMs (areas which have always clearly interested Hassabis far more) taking a bit of a backseat.

It's going to be hard for people to see this right now. I mean, just look at today's headlines matched with the other headlines about the departures and the fact that Google has clearly flubbed the Gemini 3.5 Pro model and... yikes.

But the flip side is that things seemingly weren't going great with the status quo so... a shakeup can be a good thing sometimes. You hate to lose talent, let alone historic talent, but the way forward is also likely to be paved with new technology and new talent. Now Google needs to rally the troops to ensure they don't lose even more. And that's probably what today's announcements were about. Take the lumps quickly, make it all seem quite orderly, and get everyone back to the kitchen. It's time to cook.

¹ Cue the "these go to 11" jokes as that's the level inside Google at which a "Senior Fellow" sits. Again, there were two of them yesterday. Now there are zero. ↩

² Will this lead to more retention issues? We'll see... ↩

³ Fun fact: there were actually three before Jumper left, with Michel Devoret, the 2025 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, leading up Google's quantum computing efforts. ↩

2026-08-05 22:33:18

Satya Nadella was going to make Google dance.

It was February of 2023 and Microsoft's CEO was feeling confident that the overhaul of Bing, now powered by OpenAI's models, was going to change the search game. To be fair, it sort of did. But only in so far as it was one of a number of things that perhaps kicked Google into gear to eventually disrupt themselves with their own overhaul of Search, powered by their Gemini models.

Of course, the far larger kick in the ass came from ChatGPT itself and not Bing's variant. Microsoft's version became more famous for suggesting that reporters leave their spouses and getting quickly reined in. Soon afterwards, ChatGPT would go on to reign supreme in AI and Microsoft was back to the drawing board...

2026-08-04 19:46:41

Well, we've established one thing: there are perhaps too many people with the name 'Chang' that work at both OpenAI and Apple.

I mean, that's really the connecting thread in the messages that OpenAI has now published publicly to defend themselves against Apple's lawsuit (and hoping to halt a would-be discovery process, which is clearly Apple's bigger angle here).¹ In both the iMessages posted between (former Apple employee and current OpenAI employee) Chang Liu and an unnamed current (at least at the time) Apple employee and in the emails posted between Apple outside counsel, Gabriel Gross and OpenAI’s General Counsel Che Chang, naming mix-ups play a central role.

We already knew this about the emails thanks to reporting by NBC News a few weeks ago. This just seemingly confirms that what happened is that Apple's outside counsel Gross, got mixed up when corresponding with an OpenAI employee named Wang and accidentally emailed an OpenAI employee named Chang in a follow-up response.

It just so happens that the Chang here is actually Che Chang, who just so happens to be OpenAI's General Counsel. So yeah, that's never a great mistake to make, especially for a lawyer sending legal documents, but extra especially when the mixup involves the GC of the other company.

But actually, reading between the lines of these messages, it seems Gross did intend to email Che Chang at least in that first correspondence at 5:53pm. The redactions obfuscate this, but Gross suggests that the 5:53pm email was intended for Chang, but the follow-up one at 6:07pm (actually 6:06pm, but I digress) was meant for Wang.

Given the emails, it reads like Gross emailed Chang to discuss the situation about Wang (and included the letter sent to him alongside other documents seemingly related to Apple information being mishandled). He then followed-up with Chang 13 minutes later, but meant to message Wang, because the two had seemingly just had a phone call. The fact that he still addresses him as "Mr. Chang" (when he should be addressing "Mr. Wang") just makes this all the more confusing (likely because he was replying to the wrong thread – how amazing would it be if AI auto-inserted that greeting?). But that's seemingly what happened.

But again, the fact that Chang is not some other random OpenAI employee but instead OpenAI's GC clearly sent this mistake in a new and interesting direction.

OpenAI's lawyer was clearly like "what the fuck is this?" and quickly emails Apple's actual in-house legal team to see if it's legit or some sort of weird phishing expedition. And if it is legit, he immediately seeks to get Gross removed from the account "given this behavior". Gross emails Chang the following day to explain the mix-up, and then Apple's in-house legal team does the day after that to confirm Gross is legitimate and noting that he should have already sent an email explaining the error. And that's that. At least, that's the last email OpenAI shared here. And from their preamble, that's the last correspondence.

OpenAI notes (twice) that they believed that Apple was "resolving any issues", but that was just the wording from Gross – again, the outside counsel – to Chang, so it seems a bit misleading to frame that as Apple closing out the matter entirely. But at the same time, the person named "Wang" is not a part of Apple's actual lawsuit, filed months later, so it is weird for Apple to use this back-and-forth as the framing for that lawsuit.

Also adding to the confusion here is that another Chang – Chang Liu – is one of the two key figures in the lawsuit filed by Apple, but seemingly has nothing to do with the email back and forth here. Instead, it's this other former Apple/current OpenAI employee named "Wang" who seemingly was being monitored for the same or similar Apple information handling/mishandling issues that Chang Liu is being accused of.

Got it? Because I barely do.

The fact that Apple framed this whole mix-up as OpenAI not responding to their initial inquiry is... not great. It does look like they were responding – well, at least Wang – and that at least that issue was being resolved. Apple is seemingly framing Che Chang not responding to actually talk with Gabriel Gross (in that first email) as the non-response bit, but again, that was sort of Apple's own fault! Well, their outside counsel's at least.

At the very least, it gave OpenAI an opening to not respond to the actual issue. But they probably still should have?! As OpenAI writes today:

Apple had claimed that they contacted OpenAI in February and that we didn’t respond. They now admit that their outside lawyers emailed the wrong person after confusing two Asian last names—only after we brought this to their attention. Apple also claimed they had a discussion with our General Counsel, which they now concede never happened. But they again hide the fact that they never raised the specific allegations in this lawsuit at that time, and that they in fact told us that they were “resolving any issues”. We then heard nothing for five months until they sued. In their latest filing, Apple tries hard to spin this sequence of events, but you can just read the emails for yourself here⁠.

This reads like a fairly disingenuous retelling of events given the emails OpenAI shared. And the company has some history of being slippery in this regard.²

At the same time, the next paragraph from OpenAI reads like a decidedly more fair and level-headed assessment of the situation (given the messages):

Apple accuses Chang Liu of accessing Apple confidential information after leaving the company, but only now admits that Apple employees reached out to him and asked for his help to locate this information (you can read the messages here⁠). Apple now tries to shift the blame to “residual access”, but they also don’t disclose that this is a common issue with Apple which is caused by them failing to properly manage system access when people leave. What that means in practice is that former employees who are trying to do the right thing when they leave still have access to Apple files—despite not wanting them or even being aware of them.

It is interesting/curious that this "common issue" was itself recently in the press as an "exclusive". Feels a bit strategically leaky...

Back to the iMessages,³ the current Apple employee clearly gets spooked when they get a notification that "Chang" has joined a spreadsheet. They note that they may have to "hit the workday button now" which suggests it would finally and fully cut off access to Chang Liu's files – which is fairly damning as it's an acknowledgement that they know they shouldn't be accessing these files and that they know how to turn it off. (And actually, it's Chang Liu who pushes to turn iMessage access off because it might leak OpenAI information the other way, to Apple!)

Chang Liu responds that he doesn't have access to the spreadsheet in question and that it's "Maybe the new Chang". Yes, it's seemingly another Chang naming mix-up!⁴ So they keep going...

Anyway, most of the iMessages that OpenAI shares here are decidedly more murky, simply because there's so much that's redacted. Obviously this is to protect Apple's confidential information – largely, it seems project names but also clearly some details on timing; it's impossible to know what else given the redactions – and it's still not a great look that an OpenAI employee is talking about such things so openly with a current Apple employee.

The most damning portion may be when other current Apple employees are added to the chat thread and one promptly responds with:

Hi, this is highly irregular, please remove me from this thread

Yeah, not great.

Then again, these messages do help frame it as much more of a casual correspondence with the Apple employee seeking help from their former colleague. Anyone who has ever left a job can undoubtedly relate. Someone you used to work with pings you for some help on something you used to know about/work on. Technically, you probably shouldn't help them, but come on, we're all humans. So yeah, these messages make it seem less like some big coordinated effort to steal from Apple and more like some bad judgement on a former Apple employee's part. But also the current Apple employee's part too!

In that regard, it's probably a good thing for OpenAI that this is angling towards a jury trial, because they might be more um, open to seeing the human error side of this. Because technically, legally, there's still clearly some at the very least proprietary information changing hands here.

And that's not great for OpenAI even if it just opens the door to discovery. More and more that seems to be the real angle here. Apple appears to be using this situation as a wedge to pry open the doors to any and all communication within OpenAI about information that relates to what former Apple employees are now working on within OpenAI.

Like, say, an AI speaker. Or a phone-like device.

You have to believe there's going to be a lot of such information simply given the fact that some 400+ people who used to work at Apple now work at OpenAI! That doesn't mean any of it will be damning let alone illegal, but well, Apple would like to see that to decide for themselves!

OpenAI would not like Apple to see any of that, one imagines.⁵

So the question now is if a judge is going to allow that discovery process to happen. It's clearly not a coincidence that OpenAI is releasing their side of the story now as yesterday Apple formally filed their request for a preliminary injunction against Chang Liu and Tang Tan (who OpenAI defended in their post today, but didn't release any documents/correspondence about). Most notably, Apple is also seeking "expedited discovery". And also seeking depositions of Chang Liu and Tang Tan and Yu-Ting Peng.

If you recognize that last name, it's because she's named in the suit as a co-conspirator with Chang Liu, but interestingly, wasn't actually sued by Apple. Given everything that has been reported, you'd be forgiven to think the messages OpenAI published here were between Chang Liu and Peng. But wait, at one point he says "Thank you sir!" in response which sure suggests it's not Peng. And actually, their potentially problematic correspondence was stated to have taken place over Line, not iMessage so... Why is OpenAI publishing this set of messages? Pretty clearly to establish that Chang Liu was simply trying to help Apple employees, who were the ones asking for it. But this clearly isn't the problematic communication and actions that Apple pointed to in the actual lawsuit – which also includes the downloading of documents. The fact that OpenAI didn't publish those now looks weird, at best.

"Just iMessages might get you in trouble," as Chang Liu writes at one point. For now, indeed. But there's clearly more to come. A lot more.

One more thing: per the Reuters report on Apple's preliminary injunction, beyond Tang Tan, Chang Liu, and Yu-Ting Peng, Apple also is specifically looking to depose another "unnamed OpenAI employee who previously worked at Apple." Unclear who that might be. Could it be "Wang"?! Perhaps even more intriguingly:

Apple also sought depositions from corporate representatives of OpenAI and ‌io ⁠Products, which is OpenAI's commercial arm and is listed as a defendant in the lawsuit.

Is this Apple's way to subtly rope in Jony Ive as well? Or are they going to continue to (clearly intentionally) leave him out of this? What about Sam Altman?

¹ Pretty standard OpenAI playbook at this point to publish such corresepondence, see also: the Elon Musk lawsuit. OpenAI always seems to have to "sadly" publish such things. Which in this case, did not stop a trial (and the embarassing disclosures) even if OpenAI won that one in the end.

² As an aside, is it too 3D Chess to think that Che Chang made such a big deal out of this mix-up knowing that it could help any potential legal issues down the road – and/or distract from what Apple's outside counsel is looking into? But then again, we don't know what documents were actually inadvertently shared, so... I'm just putting it out there! ↩

³ Which, kudos to OpenAI for the formatting in their blogpost. Not only does the back-and-forth actually resemble actual iMessages, there are blue bubbles! ↩

⁴ "That new Chang has big shoes to fill." ↩

⁵ Another reason why, perhaps, they shouldn't have poked the bear in the months leading up to this situation... ↩

2026-08-04 04:38:19

If you live online, you'll have noticed the vibe has shifted pretty substantially against Anthropic in recent weeks. Whereas even just a few months ago, the company was seen as the more scrappy, idealistic underdog – one which happened to be formed by founders who left the seemingly unstoppable foe in OpenAI – that tide has now turned.

Certainly part of it is just the shift from underdog to presumed leader in AI. But a lot of it has to do with the way Anthropic carries itself as a company. Whereas the strong stances and rhetoric were once seen as almost endearing, now they're seen more as a problem. From the US Government to Big Tech and many in between.

The mood now feels so negative against Anthropic that it seems worth asking the obvious question that no one wants to bother with any longer: what if they're right?

2026-08-03 18:00:45

Look, the numbers are great. Perhaps even incredible given where the box office has been in the last few years post-pandemic. But what they aren't are actual records. At least if we're being honest with ourselves.

A powerful one-two punch from “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” and “The Odyssey” has fueled the biggest collective weekend in box office history, with roughly $430 million across all movies in the marketplace.

Prior to this, the top three weekends were led by 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame” ($402 million collectively), 2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War” ($314 million collectively) and 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” ($313 million collectively). It’s a particularly exciting benchmark for the recently married Tom Holland and Zendaya, who star in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” and “The Odyssey.”

I personally find it odd that these headlines keep coming unabated despite the fact that perhaps the only topic on which more ink has been spilled in the past few years than the death of the movie theater has been on the concept of inflation. Because of the way that money and time work, this is simply not a real comparison. It's not exactly apples-to-oranges, but it's certainly not dollars-to-dollars!

I harp on this a lot, and have for years, but I feel the need to dumb it down even further to make it clear:

Yes, $430M is more than $402M in 2026. But the problem is that only the $430M number is from 2026. The $402M number is from 2019. Thanks to said inflation, $402M earned in 2019 is actually closer to $525M in 2026 if you simply adjust using the consumer pricing index numbers. The reality is slightly more nuanced because movie ticket prices don't track exactly to this number, and actually overall inflation has caused the CPI to rise faster than ticket prices. Still, the 2019 number is almost certainly closer to $500M when adjusting for 2026 movie ticket prices.

$525M – or even just $500M – is still more than $430M. So what we're really celebrating here is that things are more expensive with time. That includes milk. That includes movie tickets. Congrats, everyone.

“We have conquered a box-office milestone that seemed forever out of reach,” says Paul Dergarabedian, Rentrak’s head of marketplace trends. “This is now only the second $400 million-plus weekend in box office history.”

$400M today is likely to look something more like $750M - $800M in 2050, so one imagines we won't be touting such "forever out of reach" numbers by then. Calm down, dude.

You know what other metric is at or near a record? The number of theaters that movies are opening in. When Batman set a record opening in 1989, it did so in just under 2,200 locations. Brand New Day just opened in 4,487,¹ just shy of Top Gun: Maverick's 2022 record of 4,735 locations.

Look, again, it was a great weekend! But I don't see the point of not putting it into the actual, appropriate context. I mean, I certainly do if you're Hollywood! And I guess I do if you're a Hollywood trade publication. (Though, to be fair, another article about the weekend not fully centered around the "record" does caveat that the numbers are not inflation-adjusted.) Still, readers outside of the industry might want at least a dose of reality in such reporting.

The 2018 $314M weekend number adjusted with CPI ends up being about $418M, so this new "record" weekend would hold there, just barely. However the 2015 $313M weekend translates to $441M in 2026 money, so the "record" again falls there, just barely. But don't you think it's curious how every record weekend before this one occurred in a four year span from 2015 to 2019? Again, that's inflation!

The actual box office records for individual movies illustrates this point well. Gone with the Wind, which was released in 1939, remains the all-time leader at $1.85B. Second is Star Wars (aka A New Hope – the first of the first trilogy), released in 1977 at $1.63B. The Sound of Music, released in 1965 is third at $1.3B. In fact, to find a movie released after 2000, you have to go down to #11, The Force Awakens, the first of the third Star Wars trilogies which yes, powered the 2015 weekend mentioned above.

And wait a minute, it's sort of buried by Box Office Mojo, but those adjusted numbers are only updated for 2019 ticket prices! Updated to 2026 prices, $1.85B becomes... $2.4B for Gone with the Wind!Star Wars' 2019 figure would look more like $2.13B now. The Sound of Music would be at $1.7B today. That's just domestic.

In that regard, for context, the biggest movie released all of last year was either Zootopia 2 or The Minecraft Movie (depending on if you only include 2025 domestic box office), both around $430M. This year's crop will for sure finish far higher – Toy Story 5 is already past that number, Super Mario Galaxy is inches away, The Odyssey should surpass it this week – but let's just say the winner ends up being this new Spider-Man, and let's try to extrapolate out to say that it might end up in the $750M - $900M range (which is likely generous as it probably won't have the holding power of The Odyssey – superhero movies tend to be far more front-loaded and fall faster). That could come close to the current all-time box office champ (when not accounting for inflation): the aforementioned The Force Awakens at $937M.

But wait, actually, that Force Awakens number would be more like $1.3B in 2026 dollars. There's that pesky inflation again!

The only movie on that non-adjusted all-time list released before 2000 is 1997's Titanic at #9. Beyond that, there's only one other movie released in the 90s – 1999's The Phantom Menace, the first of the second trilogy – at #23. To find a movie not released in the past 30 years, you have to go to #28 where, yes, the first Star Wars again resides (after a few re-releases). To finally find a non-Star Wars movie to make the cut, you have to go to #34 with 1982's E.T (also after several re-releases).

Again, all of this is just meant to illustrate the roll inflation and ticket prices play in these numbers. We're celebrating an all-time weekend, but that's simply because money's value is also at an all-time high. If we wanted a more honest measurement, we'd use tickets sold or even something like per-capita filmgoing. But Hollywood would prefer we don't look at those numbers, for obvious reasons.

At the end of the day, I suppose the most important thing is unlike many of its high-grossing brethren, Spider-Man: Brand New Day will actually turn a profit at the box office. In fact, it undoubtedly already has! Ditto with The Odyssey and several other movies this year, thus far. That's great! And certainly better than years past. But it's also undoubtedly not that great when compared to the type of profit margins that the actual highest grossing movies of all time used to pull.

For those margins and profits, we probably have to turn to the talent streaming in from YouTube...

One more thing: sure, let's call this a new hope or a brand new day. And movie theaters and Hollywood will take whatever wins they can get. But just to keep the wet blanket wrapped around the narrative for a moment, I'll note that despite the shocked euphoria that Hollywood now seems to be expressing over these numbers, this was entirely predictable. In fact, it was one of my predictions for 2026! But it came with a warning:

A box office boom, but... – Spider-Man, Avengers, Hunger Games, Jumanji, Toy Story, Shrek, Mandalorian (and Grogu), Mario, Minions, Moana, Michael Jackson, Narnia, Odyssey, Dune, Steven Spielberg back with aliens – even if all of them don't hit (Supergirl?), enough of them will to boost the box office results for 2026, perhaps even past the pre-pandemic levels finally (not counting for inflation, because Hollywood ridiculously never seems to...). Everyone will trumpet the return of movie theaters, and yet it won't change any of the longer-term trends and issues with the industry. Of course, we won't be able to see that fully until 2027 and beyond...

Yeah... (Also, nailed it with the Supergirl sub-prediction there!)

Update: I've now seen Spider-Man: Brand New Day and I will just say, it's very good. A little long, but well made and entertaining. Regardless of the money funny business with records, I feel like it's important to note that a huge reason for its success is that it's good, plain and simple.

Update 2: Shocking exactly no one, Sony is now saying that Spider-Man: Brand New Day has actually leaped ahead of Avengers: Endgame with $360M to become the top opening of all time. Of course, that $360M is in 2026 dollars and...

¹ Honestly, the most impressive think about Spider-Man's opening here is that it posted the numbers without IMAX, because those screens are still tied up showing The Odyssey. Of course, given their clearly maximum utilization, it doesn't change any point about the overall weekend numbers. ↩