Director Destin Daniel Cretton’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day from Marvel and Sony continued its historic box office run by topping $2.2 billion last weekend, and the MCU blockbuster is now on pace to inevitably pass Titanic and Ne Zha 2 on all-time box office charts to become the fourth-biggest movie ever released. The film quickly became this year’s highest earner after only a week in theaters.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day – By The Numbers
After hitting $2 billion last weekend, a number that was initially consider a potential big final gross, Spider-Man: Brand New Day once again topped expectations with a nearly $110 million fourth weekend, ending Sunday atop a massive $855 million domestic and $1.365 billion international. After four weeks at #1, Brand New Day should sit atop about $2.27 billion by close of business Wednesday, if not sooner. It could hit that number on Tuesday, depending on how well it’s still holding on weekdays, especially overseas where the film shows no signs of slowing.
Today, Spider-Man will pass Avengers: Endgame to become the second-highest domestic box office in history, leaving only Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens with $936 million between Spidey and the stateside crown.
Can Spider-Man: Brand New Day reach $1 billion in North America? That prospect now looks increasingly likely, as does a global final tally higher than $2.4 billion and possibly hitting $2.5 billion.
While the $1 billion figure is definitely still possible in domestic markets, it would require continued strong holds for at least another five to six weeks minimum, and even that might not be enough to clear the bar set by The Force Awakens. More likely in that time frame, the film should be eyeing somewhere between $915-925 million in total North American ticket sales, and that’s probably going to be close to its final cume.
For worldwide receipts, Spider-Man: Brand New Day looks to finish its run at roughly $2.45 billion, give or take a couple of million bucks. These are modest estimates in line with typical performance adjusted for current weekly declines, so again there is still a chance for Brand New Day to play at the higher end of potential and wind up hitting both the domestic $936+ million figure and around $1.56+ billion, to push it over a $2.5 billion grand total.
Just to put Brand New Day’s performance into perspective, it has been out a total of 27 days, meaning it has earned an average of $82.2 million per day. That’s of course heavily skewed by weekends, including the stunning $932 million debut weekend, the second largest opening of all time behind Avengers: Endgame’s $1.2 billion in 2019. Spider-Man already passed three of the four Avengers features.
The MCU Spider-Man movies are the only superhero franchise besides Avengers still in the top-20 highest grossing films in history. There was a time when Batman’s Dark Knight Trilogy, Black Panther, and other superheroes landed among the biggest cinematic grossers. But in the past several years, Avatar sequels and kid-focused family films such as Ne Zha 2, Zootopia 2, Inside Out 2, The Lion King, Frozen 2, and Barbie have taken advantage of declined audience interest in superhero genre pictures and scored billion-plus dollar results to dominate box office charts.
Still, five Marvel MCU films (three Avengers, two Spider-Man) sit in the top 20, as does a Star Wars sequel, which also fall into the family-friendly category besides their primary superhero and sci-fantasy genres, respectively. And this Christmas’ Avengers: Doomsday is already doing impressive business in pre-sales that point to a huge debut, so I expect a $2 billion performance for Doomsday, giving Disney’s family of studios a mind-blowing 14 of the top 20 highest grossing films of all time.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day will next set its sights on Avatar: The Way of Water at #3 on the all-time worldwide box office charts, so we’ll see if it can deliver another new record this coming weekend.