The biggest games now earn more in a year than the biggest film earns in its whole run

The fairest comparison is gross against gross: what consumers paid at the box office against what players paid in a game. On that basis, Roblox took $6.79 billion in 2025 alone, 2.7 times the entire run of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Honor of Kings has taken $4–5.5 billion every year since 2021.

Cinemas keep about 55% of a ticket; app stores and console stores keep 15–30% of a game purchase. Measured as money reaching the studio or publisher, the gap in games’ favour gets wider, not smaller.

Eight of the top ten are free-to-play, selling skins, passes and currency every week for years; the other two, Call of Duty and EA Sports FC, are annual full-price releases that also earn heavily from in-game spending. Games sold once at full price behave like films: a big launch, then a long, thin tail. Hogwarts Legacy, the best premium launch of the period, sold over 40 million copies for roughly $2 billion, close to Avatar: The Way of Water.

The leaders are also concentrated in mobile and China. Tencent publishes or part-owns four of the top ten: Honor of Kings, PUBG Mobile/Peacekeeper Elite, League of Legends (through Riot) and Fortnite (through its ~40% Epic stake). New mobile hits such as Monopoly GO! ($6B in under three years) and Whiteout Survival ($3B in 2025) now outsell any premium release.

Most profitable game: no publisher discloses profit per title, so this is an estimate. Honor of Kings most likely leads: about $24.6 billion of billings, roughly 80% reaching Tencent after channel fees, and a live-service margin near 50% suggest about $10 billion of operating profit in five years. Garena, whose profit comes mostly from Free Fire, is the best-documented rival: $7.9 billion of reported adjusted EBITDA over the five years, within the error band of our Honor of Kings estimate. Call of Duty’s segment earned $1.67 billion in 2021 alone, about 2.5–3 times the most profitable film of that year.

Revenue does not guarantee profit. Roblox, the third-largest game by spending, lost $4.6 billion over the same five years because it pays creators and spends heavily on safety and servers. Epic said in March 2026 it was “spending significantly more” than it earned as Fortnite engagement fell.

Return per dollar tells a different story. The highest multiples belong to cheap projects that broke out: Palworld (under $7 million to make), Squid Game’s first season ($21.4 million), Clair Obscur (under $10 million) and Ne Zha 2 (about $80 million). Film tentpoles costing $200–400 million return 3–11× their budget at the box office; GTA V is the exception among big-budget projects at about 38× over 13 years.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day reached $1 billion in six days in August 2026, opening to about $930 million worldwide. Of the products tracked here, only GTA V (three days, 2013) and Avengers: Endgame (five days) were faster. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II took ten days. Mobile games are slow starters but never stop: Monopoly GO! needed about five months to reach $1 billion and kept going to $6 billion.

Deadline’s annual profit estimates, built from studio and financing sources, show studios collect about 45% of worldwide gross as theatrical rentals, then add $300–445 million from home entertainment and streaming licences. A $1 billion film therefore brings in about $750–800 million of studio revenue and, after production, marketing, talent participations and overhead, typically $200–400 million of profit: Deadline put Jurassic World Dominion at $230 million, Doctor Strange 2 at $284 million and Moana 2 at $415 million. The record is Inside Out 2 at $650 million; our estimate for Brand New Day is about $840 million, a quarter of which goes to Disney/Marvel.

Franchises close part of the gap with games. The 15 Marvel films of 2021–26 grossed $12.4 billion together, about what EA Sports FC earned. Game IP is now a film engine too: the two Mario films grossed $2.37 billion and A Minecraft Movie $960 million.

A streaming series has no ticket or price, so its “revenue” is always a proxy. Netflix valued Squid Game’s first season at $891 million against a $21.4 million cost. Splitting Netflix’s revenue by viewing hours ($0.18–0.24 per hour in 2023–25) puts even the most-watched series, such as Wednesday and Stranger Things 4, at about $0.3 billion each. A top live-service game makes that in three to four weeks.

The money in TV sits at platform level. Netflix earned $45.2 billion in 2025 with a 29.5% operating margin; Disney’s streaming unit swung from a $4 billion loss in 2022 to a $1.3 billion profit in 2025. Game adaptations now feed back into games: Amazon’s Fallout series added an estimated $80 million of Fallout game sales in five months.

The Eras Tour is the biggest concert tour ever at $2.08 billion over 149 shows, roughly what Honor of Kings bills in five months, and promoters keep only 3–10% of concert revenue. Labubu-led growth took Pop Mart from ¥13 billion to ¥37 billion of revenue in a year, with a 35% net margin, the one non-game product that matches top-game economics. Pokémon, a game-born franchise, generated $15.7 billion of licensed-product retail sales in 2025 alone (License Global).

In China, micro-dramas (vertical, one-to-two-minute episodes) overtook the cinema box office in 2024 and reached ¥67.8 billion in 2025, 1.3 times the box office.

Newzoo puts 2025 player spending at $201.6 billion, the first year above $200 billion, against $33.6 billion of global box office. Add recorded music ($31.7B), live music ($38.2B) and sports media rights (~$60B) and the total is still about $40 billion short of games. Only TV advertising and books, both broadly defined and flat, come close, and subscription streaming (~$113B) is the largest content rival.

The box office has not recovered: 2025 was still 21% below 2019’s $42.3 billion. Games dipped in 2022, their first decline on record, then grew 9% in 2025 on Chinese mini-games and PC; part of that jump reflects Newzoo’s revised mobile method.

GTA VI should be among the fastest products ever to reach $1 billion (our estimate: one to three days, from 25 million or more launch buyers at $70–100), and Take-Two guides $8.0–8.2 billion of bookings for the year to March 2027. First-year forecasts range from about $3 billion to well above $5 billion; at the top end it would rival a year of Roblox or Honor of Kings, though not their five-year totals.

The 2021 giants are slowing. Roblox’s growth fell to 8% in Q2 2026 and it guides to a decline; Fortnite engagement has dropped since 2025 and Epic cut over 1,000 jobs; mobile game spending in app stores fell 2% in the first half. Cinema is recovering: August 2026 was the biggest month of the decade at $4.6 billion, and Avengers: Doomsday opens on 18 December.