Credit: Scott Garfield / © Warner Bros. / courtesy Everett Collection
Published Feb 21, 2026, 12:37 PM EST
Brennan Klein (he/him) is a senior news writer at Screen Rant, host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast, and contributor at Alternate Ending and Horror Press. He has been writing and podcasting about pop culture (especially horror movies) for over a decade at platforms including Blumhouse, Fangoria, Dread Central, The Backlot, and Arrow in the Head.
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China's Pegasus 3 is racing up the chart.
The new movie is a sequel to 2019's Pegasus and 2024's Pegasus 2. All three of the live-action Chinese movies were directed and written by Han Han and star Teng Shen as racing champion Zhang Chi.
Per Deadline, as of Saturday morning, the Chinese racing movie sequel Pegasus 3 is set to earn a 6-day debut total of $400 million in China by the end of the territory's New Year frame. This will make it the first 2026 release to hit the $400 million global milestone, blowing past the year's previous No. 1 movie, which is Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights with a cumulative $125.8 million.
This sees Pegasus 3 taking less than a week to nearly outgross the entire run of the previous installment. Although Pegasus 2 was the 16th highest-grossing movie of 2024 worldwide, it only grossed $423.2 million worldwide by the end of its run, falling behind titles such as Tim Burton's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ($452 million), part one of Wicked ($757.9 million), and Pixar's Inside Out 2 ($1.699 billion).
This marks the second year in a row that the Chinese New Year has resulted in a record-breaking influx of box office dollars.
In 2025, China's Ne Zha 2 opened with $430.3 million over the holiday frame and quickly became the first movie to ever gross more than $1 billion in a single territory. Its overall $2.26 billion haul makes it the highest-grossing animated movie of all time and the fifth highest-grossing movie ever worldwide.
It remains to be seen if Pegasus 3 will be able to follow in Ne Zha II's footsteps. However, if it has a similar trajectory, it could potentially gross $2.1 billion worldwide by the end of its run. Even if it has a major slowdown, it seems set to become the second movie to ever gross more than $1 billion in a single territory.
It remains to be seen how much it earns overall, but it could very well be a long while before Pegasus 3 is rivaled by any English-language 2026 releases. While there are a few upcoming movies that could very well be billion-dollar hits, including Toy Story 5, the live-action remake of Moana, and Minions & Monsters, the first isn't set to arrive until April, when The Super Mario Galaxy Movie debuts.
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