Rules

Make a list that predicts the top 10 highest-grossing (domestic, not worldwide) movies of the year, using Wikipedia's List of American Films of 2026. At the end of the year, we compare the predictions to the actual list as reported by Box Office Mojo.

Note: The final list only includes movies released in the calendar year 2026 and money reported by the last day of the year, December 31st. Movies released late in the year may only have a partial box office run. For example, in 2022, Avatar: The Way of Water made $684,075,767 over its full run, which made it the 2nd highest-grossing movie released that year. But only 60% of that ($401,007,908) was reported between its release on December 14th and the end of the year, so it placed 4th for Bayhem.

In addition to the 10 films on your list, include a Dark Horse pick. This is a non-sequel film that is too risky to consider for the top 10, but has a chance to break out huge at the box office. Dark Horse picks cannot be sequels, but they can be spin-offs, reboots, or origin stories that connect to an existing universe of movies (Fantastic Four: First Steps is eligible even though it is part of the Avengers universe). Examples: Minecraft (2025), Barbie (2023), and Dune (2021).

Lists must be submitted on this site on or before January 16, 2026. After the deadline, all lists are public.

It is $20 to participate. Dues must be received by the end of January. Dues may be given in cash, check, or sent via PayPal or Venmo (ask Ryan for the details).

• 1st place$100
• 2nd place$40

If there is a tie for 2nd place, the players who tied can split the winnings. But if there is a tie for 1st place, a true champion must be found! The winner is decided by a side bet that all agree on, which must be completed by January 31st. The co-winners can agree to split the winnings or give all the money to the winner of the side bet.

Project Bayhem is a love letter to big dumb movies. The Project Bayhem Challenge is an annual competition with a small, but growing group of similarly cinematically enthralled amigos, in which we try to predict the top 10 highest-grossing movies of the upcoming year. Each January we craft our lists after a painstaking amount of research and then, come December 31st, we tally up who came closest.

The name Project Bayhem is an amalgam of two things:

• Project Mayhem from the film Fight Club, in which the members attempt to bring down the establishment by causing as much chaos as possible, and…
• Director Michael Bay, whose movies inexplicably make a killing at the box office despite being incoherent, characterless pieces of cinematic upchuck.

Project Bayhem is not trying to bring down the Hollywood establishment. Despite the occasional Transformers sequel, we rather like the state of film and just want to celebrate our love of cinema by throwing untold sums of money into a pot and betting on things that we won't know the outcome of for many, many months… just like Hollywood does.