Kids Have Already Decided What to Be for Halloween
Halloween is nine weeks out but the searches have started. Here's what we're seeing.
1. Spider-Man
Show the numbers
| Last week of August | Spider-Man |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 19 |
| 2022 | 21 |
| 2023 | 22 |
| 2024 | 19 |
| 2025 | 23 |
| 2026 | 49 |
"spiderman costume" peaked 2023-10-22. Each term is indexed to its own five-year maximum, so values compare with themselves over time and never across terms.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day took $1.7 billion and was the biggest film of 2026, and unlike most blockbusters it converted directly into a costume, because the costume was already a costume. There is nothing to interpret. A kid who liked the movie wants the suit, and the suit has existed since 1962.
2. Toy Story
Show the numbers
| Last week of August | Toy Story |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 17 |
| 2022 | 22 |
| 2023 | 21 |
| 2024 | 19 |
| 2025 | 27 |
| 2026 | 45 |
"toy story costume" peaked 2025-10-19. Each term is indexed to its own five-year maximum, so values compare with themselves over time and never across terms.
Toy Story 5 arrived seven years after the last one, which is long enough to have produced a clean generational split. A child who met Woody this summer is meeting him for the first time. The adult who took them has known him since 1995, at roughly the same age. Very few properties can do that, and none of the other films this year did.
The costume is a pair, and that is most of why it moves. Woody and Jessie are the sibling costume, the twins costume, the two-friends-who-agreed-on-something costume, and the parent-and-kid costume, which is a category that barely exists otherwise. Spider-Man is a costume you wear alone.
It is also the one on this list a household can mostly already do. A cowboy hat, a checked shirt, a red braid. Nothing here needs to arrive in a box, which matters at the end of October when the thing you ordered has not.
3. Nikki, from Obsession
Obsession opened on 15 May and made $501 million on a small budget, growing its take weekend over weekend, which almost nothing does. It gave 2026 its one genuinely new horror face. Everything else frightening this year arrived with a number after its name.
The costume is a red zebra tank, black pleather shorts, a black wig and a silver chain. Not one of those is sold as a costume, which is precisely why it works at the age where dressing up has started to feel slightly embarrassing. It reads as an outfit until somebody recognises it, and then it reads as a very good joke.
4. Miranda Priestly
Miranda Priestly is the rare Halloween costume that leaves you better dressed than you were before you put it on.
The specification is four things. A white bob, oversized dark glasses, a floor-sweeping coat, and a bag you set down as though it has personally disappointed you. None of it is a costume. All of it is clothing, which means it survives the walk to the party, the bar afterwards, and every photograph in between, and it never needs a word of explanation from the person wearing it.
The timing is the sequel, twenty years after the original, which is exactly long enough for two audiences to exist at once. The people who saw it at twenty-five are running things now. The people who found it on streaming last winter have never seen it in a cinema. Both of them recognise the coat.
5. The yard
Home Depot's 2026 collection landed on 16 July and is the largest yet: Skelly now takes an app, records thirty sounds, speaks live in your own voice through a modulator, and has eyes you can aim. He has been joined by an eleven-foot mummy and an eight-foot plant monster.
6. The pets
Methodology
We analyzed conversational and purchase data from Scout, a vibe shopping app, Google search trends data and industry research to create this report. Every chart compares the last week of August across six years, and each term is indexed to its own five-year maximum, so a line is comparable with itself over time and never with another term.
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