Spider-Man: Brand New Day becomes only second film to cross $900 million domestically

Sony and Marvel's "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" crossed $900 million at the domestic box office on Friday, becoming only the second film ever to reach that figure and doing so faster than any movie in history, according to industry tracking reported by Deadline. The only other title to cross $900 million domestically is Disney and Lucasfilm's "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," which took 50 days to get there in late 2015 and early 2016. "Brand New Day" needed 36.

A record pace, milestone by milestone

The film, released July 31, opened to $360.1 million from 4,487 North American theaters, the biggest domestic opening weekend on record, ahead of the $357.1 million "Avengers: Endgame" made in 2019. It went on to become the fastest film ever to reach $800 million domestically, hitting that mark in 19 days, and it passed "Avengers: Endgame" in late August to become the No. 2 film of all time at the North American box office. As of Thursday, before Friday's update pushed it past $900 million, Box Office Mojo listed the film's cumulative domestic gross at $899,762,495 and its worldwide total at roughly $2.34 billion. Sony has called it the studio's highest-grossing release ever, reaching $2 billion worldwide in 17 days, faster than "Avengers: Endgame" managed in 2019.

How a fourth Spider-Man film got here

"Brand New Day" is the 38th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the fourth to feature Tom Holland's Peter Parker, following 2021's "No Way Home." Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton from a script by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, it also stars Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jon Bernthal and Mark Ruffalo, and follows a Peter Parker whose identity has been erased from public memory as mounting pressure forces a change in the character. The studio leaned hard on premium formats to sustain the run: a joint press release from Sony Pictures and CJ 4DPLEX issued this week said the movie generated more than $104 million combined across the SCREENX and 4DX formats in 33 days, breaking a record previously held by "Avatar: The Way of Water," which took 228 days to reach a similar figure, and setting opening records for SCREENX in 36 countries and 4DX in 22. Sony's Steven O'Dell said in that release that "the global response to 'Spider-Man: Brand New Day' in premium formats has been extraordinary," while CJ 4DPLEX chief executive Jun Bang said reaching the record in just over a month made the achievement "even more extraordinary," and CJ 4DPLEX Americas chief executive Don Savant said the run "demonstrates the tremendous opportunity premium formats create" for a theatrical release built around repeat viewing.

That premium-format push mattered because "Brand New Day" spent its early weeks competing for large-format screens with Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," which had claimed an exclusive early IMAX window. Sony expanded the Marvel sequel into IMAX across North America in early August once that window closed, a decision trade coverage credited with helping sustain the film's grosses into its second and third months rather than letting it fade the way most wide releases do after an opening surge.

A Labor Day box office bent around one film

The milestone landed in the middle of the four-day Labor Day weekend, which "Brand New Day" was projected to lead for a sixth consecutive frame, ahead of a slate of new and holdover releases that included:

• "Coyote vs. Acme," the Ketchup Entertainment release that opened to roughly $15.9 million, the distributor's biggest debut ever
• Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," continuing toward $600 million domestic in its eighth weekend
• Disney and Pixar's 20th-anniversary re-release of "Cars"
• "By Any Means," the Elegance Bratton-directed drama starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Mark Wahlberg, which opened well behind the weekend's other titles

For theater chains and rival distributors, the effect has been to compress an already crowded holiday frame into a fight for the space "Brand New Day" leaves behind. Smaller distributors such as Ketchup Entertainment and A24 are relying on the extended four-day frame and counterprogramming against the Marvel sequel's family and younger-adult audience rather than trying to match its scale directly. Box-office totals of this kind are compiled from grosses reported by theater chains and standardized through Comscore, the measurement service the industry uses to track admissions and ticket revenue.

The record that remains just out of reach

What the film has not yet done is unseat "The Force Awakens" as the highest-grossing movie in domestic box-office history, a title Disney's Lucasfilm secured when the 2015 film became, in the words of Disney's own announcement of an earlier milestone in that run, the fastest movie ever to break a prior domestic record. "The Force Awakens" finished its run at $936.66 million domestically, a figure that has stood for nearly eleven years. With "Brand New Day" now just past $900 million, roughly $37 million separates the two films, a gap several box-office analysts expect to close within the next few weeks as the Marvel sequel continues its theatrical run into the fall.

Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group chairman Tom Rothman addressed the film's early box-office run when it opened in early August, crediting the film's cast and marketing campaign in comments carried by trade outlets including Variety.

"360 million thank-yous to all the filmmakers, actors, producers, and to my colleagues at Sony, who created such a fantastic film and an exceptional marketing and distribution campaign. Records are made to be broken, but we will take great pride in this one, for as long as we hold it."

Sony has not set a date by which it expects "Brand New Day" to overtake "The Force Awakens," and the studio's public statements this week focused on the premium-format and $900 million milestones rather than the all-time record still ahead. Analysts tracking the film's nightly grosses expect the comparison to sharpen once Labor Day receipts are finalized and the film's slower fall weekends are weighed against how much a wide re-release push, awards-season counterprogramming or additional international expansion could add. Much of that fall calendar is thinner on major blockbuster competition than the summer was, which could let "Brand New Day" keep a wide footprint in theaters longer than a typical superhero release and give it more weekends to close the gap before the record changes hands. For now, the film remains the No. 2 domestic release of all time, with the record it is chasing still standing, if narrowly, as the holiday weekend closes.