BEIJING — The last time a superhero film earned money like this in China in a single day, it was the summer of 2019, and the relationship between Hollywood’s biggest franchise machine and the world’s most important theatrical market felt stable enough that no one was keeping track of when it might end. It ended, gradually and then all at once, and the seven years that followed produced a wall of evidence that the old ceiling was gone. On Wednesday, Spider-Man: Brand New Day walked through the wreckage.
Destin Daniel Cretton’s fourth solo Spider-Man film, starring Tom Holland as Peter Parker and Zendaya as MJ, opened in China on Wednesday to a projected first-day gross of $37 million, with Maoyan, the country’s largest ticketing platform, placing its end-of-day estimate at $37.4 million. The result surpassed Spider-Man: Far From Home’s $36 million opening day from July 2019, making Brand New Day the biggest superhero opening day in China in seven years.
The scale of what fell between those two benchmark figures is the more instructive number. After Far From Home, the Chinese superhero market did not merely slow; it essentially stopped returning American caped productions at meaningful revenue. Venom: The Last Dance arrived in late 2024 as the best performer of the post-pandemic era, earning $9.4 million on its opening day. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania both landed below that. For the better part of three years, the $9 million range was the market’s ceiling for a superhero import, and most industry analysts had started treating it as structural rather than cyclical.
Wednesday’s number is not in that range. It is a different order of magnitude, and the industry’s full-run projections reflect that. Maoyan’s forecast places Brand New Day’s China total at approximately $255 million. Rival tracker Dengta goes higher still, projecting more than $265 million. Either figure would rank the film as Hollywood’s largest China gross since Avengers: Endgame in 2019, the last time the Chinese market decided a Marvel film was worth attending in numbers large enough to reshape a global total.
The absence of those years is part of the explanation for the return. Spider-Man: No Way Home, the direct predecessor to Brand New Day, was never released in China after local regulators objected to the film’s use of the Statue of Liberty in its climactic action sequence. The block that kept the 2021 film out of Chinese theaters compressed what might have been three years of audience relationship-building into a single opening week of demand. Presales for Brand New Day reached $18.6 million before Wednesday’s first screening, the strongest advance ticket sales for any imported film in China in three summers, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The audience for the character was not gone. It had been waiting for a title that could actually open there.
Holland and Zendaya attended a Shanghai premiere on July 24 as part of what Sony Pictures structured as an Asia-first release strategy, placing China’s opening ahead of the North American wide release scheduled for July 31. That sequencing was deliberate. By the time Brand New Day opens in the United States this weekend, it will arrive carrying a verified market result from China rather than a tracking projection. Deadline projects a $425 million global opening weekend once North American figures are added, a figure that would rank among the biggest worldwide openings in franchise history.
The critical environment reinforced the commercial setup. Brand New Day reached 90% Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes before its China debut, with critics calling it Holland’s most demanding and emotionally varied work as Peter Parker. A title arriving with that level of endorsement gives the Chinese market something to validate rather than discover, a different dynamic than the uneven reception that greeted several post-Endgame Marvel entries in years they were permitted to open there.
The weekend will be watched as closely in Hollywood as any box office event in recent memory. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey broke records domestically in recent weeks, but Brand New Day’s potential to push past $400 million globally in its opening weekend would constitute a different kind of signal: evidence that the international theatrical business can still produce the event-scale numbers that justified the infrastructure built around it.
The $255 million projection also arrives with a context the industry has not yet publicly addressed. Avengers: Endgame earned $629 million in China in 2019. The gap between that figure and what Brand New Day is currently projected to earn is not a rounding error; it suggests the Chinese market for Marvel films may have been permanently reset to a lower register, regardless of the quality of individual titles. What Wednesday established is that the floor of that range is meaningfully higher than the $9 million ceiling that defined it between 2022 and 2024. Whether the new ceiling sits at $255 million or continues climbing as the character re-establishes its foothold is a question that a single opening day in Beijing cannot answer. That data arrives at the end of a run, not the beginning.
Sony and Marvel will spend the coming weeks finding out which number they are actually dealing with. China, at least, opened the door to ask the question.
