Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now the reigning king of American box office hauls. The latest Spidey flick, which sets Peter Parker in a new alternate universe where his closest friends have no idea who he is, has officially overtaken Star Wars: The Force Awakens as the top-grossing movie ever at the domestic box office.
This means that Disney is the reigning box office king, with the megacorp owning/distributing/being associated with four of the five highest-grossing films at the domestic box office. The list includes two Spider-Man movies with Sony, one Avengers movie, and a Star Wars movie. The first James Cameron Avatar is also in the top five; at the time, 20th Century Fox distributed it. That company is now owned by Disney as 20th Century Studios, giving Disney distribution rights to the entire Avatar franchise.
All that is to say that technically, all five of the highest-grossing films in domestic box office history are Disney films. Expand that to the top 10, and you’ll see one outlier, Top Gun: Maverick, along with two other James Cameron films, Avatar: The Way of Water and Titanic, coming in at number 10.
Tom Holland’s fourth Spider-Man film has thus far racked up $936.77 million after nearly 50 days in theaters, shattering the previous record of $936 million, which The Force Awakens held for a decade.
International box office receipts aren’t too shabby either, as Brand New Day has collectively raked in a total of $2.4 billion, making it the third highest-grossing movie of all time behind Avatar and Avengers: Endgame. To give you a sense of just how much James Cameron’s Titanic connected with audiences back in 1997, all these years later, and all of these Marvel and Star Wars movies later, Titanic is still the fifth highest-grossing movie all time.
Spider-Man Just Beat ‘Star Wars’ at the Box Office, and the Numbers Are Ridiculous
It’s easy to see why Brand New Day became such a massive hit. The hype train for this one was bonkers, as its stars went on a worldwide media blitz. There was the bonus of Sadie Sink’s mysterious character, as fans were desperate to figure out who she was playing, even though anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Marvel characters absorbed from any bit of the company’s extraordinary pop culture reach could have (and did) accurately guess who she was playing.
Along its sprint to the top of the domestic box office, Brand New Day shattered a ton of records, like the biggest opening Friday of all time, the biggest Monday of all time, the biggest Tuesday of all time, and the fastest film to surpass $900 million domestically, a record that comes stuffed with records of every $100 million surpassed along the way to that $900 million.
It helps that the movie itself was well reviewed by both fans and critics, but all of this underscores a basic universal truth: people really, really like Spider-Man.
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