Blockbuster “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” delivered a major boost to Sony’s September quarterly earnings on the top and bottom lines.
Sony Pictures Entertainment, for the three months ended Sept. 30, reported sales up 37% to $3.23 billion and operating income of $581 million — a year-over-year increase of 527% and an all-time record for operating income in a September quarter. The results were largely driven by the box-office success of “Brand New Day.”
SPE’s theatrical revenue for the period came in at a whopping $1.28 billion, an 11-fold increase from the year-earlier period, thanks mostly to “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” alongside the performance of horror movies “Insidious: Out of the Further” and “Resident Evil.” Television productions segment revenue dropped 31% year over year, to $483 million.
“Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” which opened wide July 31, became the third-highest grossing movie in history with a haul of $2.52 billion at the global box office this summer (behind the original “Avatar” and Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame”).
The movie, starring Tom Holland as Peter Parker and Zendaya as MJ, is “not so much a superhero film, but ‘super-person’ film,” Tom Rothman, chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Motion Picture Group, said during a convo with Variety’s Cynthia Littleton at France’s Lumière Summit in September. “It’s very human. It’s very emotional. It’s got plenty of whiz-bang, but that’s not what the secret is. The secret is it’s a relatable story that almost everybody has related to.”
Overall for the September quarter, Sony’s Q2 of fiscal year 2026, the company reported revenue of 3.429 trillion yen ($21.5 billion), up 10%, and net income of 450 billion yen ($2.8 billion), up 44%.
The Japanese electronics and media conglomerate also saw strong gains in its games division. Revenue for the September quarter rose 9%, to 1.208 trillion yen ($7.6 billion), on higher network services sales and first- and third-party game title sales partially offset by a drop in PlayStation hardware sales. Sony reported 2.6 million PS5 unit sales in the period vs. 4.0 million in the year-prior quarter. PlayStation monthly active users at the end of the quarter were 127 million, up 2 million sequentially.
Sony’s Game & Network Services segment operating income jumped 83%, to 220 billion yen ($1.4 billion). A key reason for the gain was that in the year-ago quarter, it recorded 31.5 billion yen in impairment losses against a portion of game studio Bungie’s intangible and other assets and 18.3 billion yen in expenses “resulting from a correction in the amount of certain previously capitalized development costs.”
In the company’s music segment, sales for the September 2026 quarter rose 10% to 598.4 billion yen, driven by higher revenue from live events, merchandising and streaming services. Operating income increased 6% to 122.8 billion yen.
The currency conversion rate Sony used in reporting earnings was $1 U.S. to 159.3 yen.