North American Box Office Feb 20-22, 2026: Wuthering Heights and GOAT Lead with $14M Each

LOS ANGELES — A sharply divided North American box office weekend is taking shape over Feb. 20–22, 2026, with two holdovers clustered at the top while multiple wide and specialty newcomers compete for limited remaining demand.

In the lead for No. 1 are Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, and Sony Pictures Animation’s GOAT, which are running “in a close race” with projected domestic weekend grosses in the $13 million to $15 million range.

The split performance underscores a structural reality of theatrical distribution: when one or two titles concentrate audience attention, the rest of the market often turns into a contest for positioning rather than scale—especially for releases without the benefit of either holiday timing or a differentiated premium-format footprint. The weekend also lands squarely in a non-holiday, school-in-session corridor, limiting the upside for all but the most front-loaded, four-quadrant films.

A two-title race with global implications

Warner Bros. is forecasting Wuthering Heights will again outperform GOAT worldwide, with the studio projecting the film will finish Sunday, Feb. 22, 2026, “with a worldwide total in the $150 million range.” Domestically, Wuthering Heights is expected to earn $14 million over the Feb. 20–22 frame; GOAT is also expected to earn $14 million, effectively turning the weekend into a bragging-rights contest decided by Saturday night’s turnout and Sunday family matinees.

The current weekend follows a holiday launch corridor where Wuthering Heights led the Valentine’s Day/Presidents Day frame (Feb. 13–16, 2026). In North America, it delivered $32.8 million for the three-day weekend and $37.5 million across the four-day period. Internationally, the film launched to $45.5 million from more than 75 markets, for a global start of $83 million. That trajectory positions the adaptation as a rare adult-skewing literary property with crossover appeal in a marketplace that has otherwise leaned heavily on franchises and family animation.

GOAT opened the same holiday frame with $35 million domestically for the four days and $26 million for the three days. The film is described as “rolling out much more slowly overseas,” signaling that its near-term worldwide position will be more dependent on North American holds than a synchronized global release pattern. The title is another commercial success marker for Sony Pictures Animation, the label behind the Spider-Verse universe and KPop: Demon Hunters, and it comes as studios and exhibitors continue to calibrate release calendars within the rules set by the long-standing U.S. theatrical antitrust framework, anchored by the 1948 Paramount consent decree and now overseen by the Department of Justice Antitrust Division.

Faith-based sequel targets audience certainty, not scale

Among new releases, Lionsgate and Kingdom Story’s faith-based sequel I Can Only Imagine 2 is aiming for a third-place finish with a projected $8 million to $9 million domestic opening weekend after earning an A+ CinemaScore.

For exhibitors and distributors, a top CinemaScore grade can function as an early indicator of audience satisfaction within a film’s core demographic, supporting sustained week-to-week play even when overall opening size is modest. In a weekend led by two holdovers, that dynamic can be commercially meaningful for a newcomer competing for showtimes. For faith-based players, a strong start can also strengthen bargaining power in later booking windows, when chains reallocate screens in response to weekday performance and community-group block bookings.

Imax event programming tests premium demand in limited release

Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is launching as a premium-format event with an estimated $3.2 million domestic opening from 325 Imax screens. The film is built from archival materials: Luhrmann unearthed “59 hours of unseen footage from the Warner Bros. archives” that has been restored, including discarded material from two 1970s concert films. The project continues a broader push by studios and exhibitors to monetize catalog assets under contemporary rights and preservation standards set by the Library of Congress and other cultural institutions.

The title’s limited Imax opening is expected to generate nearly as much as A24’s How to Make a Killing—despite a far smaller footprint. How to Make a Killing, starring Glen Powell, is playing in 1,625 locations and is projected to land at $3 million to $3.5 million for the weekend, placing it around sixth on the chart. The contrast underlines how premium large formats and event-style engagements can concentrate revenue for theater owners even as overall audience volume remains constrained.

Wide releases at the bottom show the downside of weak turnout

At the lower end of the top 10, 20th Century Fox’s Psycho Killer is projected at $1.4 million to $1.6 million from 1,100 North American theaters—an outcome described as “appears DOA,” a steep result given its breadth of play. For exhibitors, underperforming wide releases can quickly become a scheduling and cash-flow challenge as they weigh contractual minimum runs against the opportunity to pivot screens to stronger holdovers or higher-priced premium content.

Projected domestic weekend figures (Feb. 20–22, 2026)

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is scheduled to expand nationwide on Feb. 27, 2026, giving theater chains a near-term test of whether one-off event programming can sustain demand once it moves from concentrated Imax runs into the broader multiplex ecosystem.