Sony and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day didn’t merely dominate the weekend box office—it came within striking distance of the biggest domestic debut in movie history.
The Tom Holland-led sequel opened with an astonishing $355 million from 4,487 theaters, averaging $79,117 per location. That gives the film the second-largest three-day domestic opening ever, finishing just behind the $357.1 million debut of Avengers: Endgame in 2019.
The film did manage to claim one major record outright, delivering the biggest opening day in domestic box office history with $169.3 million from Thursday previews and Friday screenings. Its opening also crushed pre-release projections, which had placed the film in the $250 million to $260 million range.
Globally, Peter Parker proved even more spectacular. Brand New Day earned an estimated $927 million worldwide during its opening weekend, also ranking as the second-largest global launch of all time. The performance is even more impressive considering the film did not have access to IMAX screens, which remained committed to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
The superhero epic has already raced past the estimated $560 million in global ticket sales that Screendollars calculates it needed to reach profitability against its reported $225 million production budget. With relatively little major competition arriving during August, the film appears positioned to remain atop the box office for several weeks.
Its massive debut helped push the overall domestic marketplace to approximately $429 million, making July 31 through August 2 the highest-grossing three-day domestic box office weekend in history. The previous record was the $402 million weekend led by Avengers: Endgame in April 2019.
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‘The Odyssey’ continues its heroic run
Even in Spider-Man’s enormous shadow, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey remained a formidable draw.
The Universal epic earned $51 million in its third weekend, dropping a respectable 43 percent and bringing its domestic total to $395.5 million after 17 days. Worldwide, the film has reached $911.4 million and has already surpassed the complete $330.1 million domestic run of Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
The film still has another potentially lucrative market ahead of it. The Odyssey is scheduled to open in China on August 14 across approximately 9,000 theaters, including roughly 800 IMAX locations. That launch could help push it beyond the $1.085 billion worldwide total of The Dark Knight Rises, currently Nolan’s highest-grossing film.
The rest of the Top Five
Disney and Pixar’s Toy Story 5 held firmly in third place with $6.3 million in its seventh weekend. The animated sequel has now earned $461.7 million domestically and crossed the billion-dollar mark with $1.066 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing entry in the Toy Story franchise.
Universal and Illumination’s Minions & Monsters followed in fourth with $5.8 million, bringing its domestic total to $168.4 million and its worldwide haul to approximately $450 million. While hardly disastrous, the film remains far below the billion-dollar neighborhood occupied by several earlier installments in the Despicable Me franchise.
Disney’s live-action Moana rounded out the Top Five with approximately $5.3 million in its fourth weekend. The remake has earned $114.8 million domestically and $261.1 million worldwide against an estimated $250 million production budget, making it one of the summer’s most significant disappointments.
Weekend Top 10
With Brand New Day arriving far above expectations and The Odyssey continuing its blockbuster run, movie theaters just experienced the kind of weekend Hollywood has spent the post-pandemic era desperately trying to recreate.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day didn’t simply save New York. He may have saved the summer box office.
