LOS ANGELES — Seventeen years is a long time to hold a record. Avengers: Endgame sat atop the domestic box office since April 2019, when the conclusion of Marvel’s infinity saga drew crowds unlike anything the industry had seen in a generation. On Monday, Spider-Man: Brand New Day ended the run.
The fourth Tom Holland-led Spider-Man film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has surpassed Endgame’s all-time North American total, making it the highest-grossing Marvel film ever at the domestic box office. Globally, it has crossed $2.22 billion and sits $44 million away from Titanic, a film that first claimed its crown over the course of a 1997 theatrical run that lasted nearly a year.
The number most people in the industry are watching now is not the domestic figure. It is the global one.
Titanic’s worldwide total, including multiple re-releases, stands at $2.264 billion. If Brand New Day closes that gap, and the trajectory suggests it will, it would mark only the second film in history to surpass Titanic’s theatrical gross, joining Avatar, which did it in 2010 before being overtaken itself. The film has earned this in roughly three weeks.
“This is going to be a top five summer of all time,” Paul Dergarabedian of Rentrak told NBC News earlier this month.
The summer, in other words, is not an accident. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man opened on the first weekend of August to $360 million in North America, the largest opening weekend ever recorded. The global haul for that single weekend was $932 million, a figure that would have qualified as a respectable lifetime gross for most studio tentpoles. No film had ever come close.
Zendaya stars alongside Holland in the film, Sony Pictures’ fourth collaboration with Marvel on the character since 2017. The studio has not issued public comment on the latest milestone.
What makes the domestic record particularly striking is what it displaced. Endgame arrived in 2019 as the conclusion to an 11-year, 22-film story arc, a convergence point for the entire MCU audience that was, by design, unrepeatable. The expectation, widely shared in Hollywood, was that Endgame’s domestic total was effectively a ceiling, a number built by a cultural moment too specific to replicate. Brand New Day shattered it without the benefit of that kind of finality. It is the fourth Spider-Man film with Holland at the center. There was no obvious reason, heading into August, why this one should outperform all three of its predecessors combined domestically. And yet it did.
The reasons, according to box office analysts, include a resurgent theatrical audience, an unusually thin release calendar from competing studios, and a summer in which Brand New Day had room to breathe that Endgame did not. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has performed strongly in its own right, clearing $1.2 billion globally, but the two films have occupied different audience segments rather than competing directly. Their coexistence has contributed to a summer in which Dune: Part Three IMAX ticket pre-sales crashed both AMC and Fandango simultaneously, an illustration of how far above baseline theatrical enthusiasm has run this year.
Brand New Day holds a 90 percent critic approval score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 98 percent audience score. The gap between those two figures is effectively zero, which is unusual for a superhero sequel at this scale. Franchise fatigue, the industry’s dominant anxiety about superhero cinema since the mid-2020s, has not materialized in the way studios feared.
Whether the film reaches Titanic globally is genuinely uncertain. Internationally, momentum can fade quickly without a sustained cultural narrative, and Titanic benefits from decades of accumulated weight that a superhero franchise cannot easily replicate in markets where theatrical attendance has been more volatile. Brand New Day has already overtaken The Force Awakens on the all-time global chart, currently holding sixth place worldwide, according to NBC News. The final $44 million may prove more stubborn than they appear.
Marvel’s next major announced project, the MCU X-Men reboot revealed at D23 earlier this month with Sadie Sink and Adam Driver, is set for 2028. Brand New Day’s performance will set the internal benchmarks against which that project is measured.
For now, one record stands where it has stood since 1997. Endgame held the domestic crown for longer than anyone expected when it was first set. The expectation, when the first Tom Holland Spider-Man opened in 2017, was that the franchise would extend the MCU’s reach rather than redefine its summit. What Brand New Day has done is something closer to a renegotiation. The numbers that once looked permanent are moving again.
Titanic’s global record remains at $2.264 billion. As of Monday, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is $44 million short. The question of whether it gets there may be answered in the next few weekends. Nobody, at this point, is betting heavily against it.
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