Tom Holland's Spider-Man: Brand New Day entered the Labor Day weekend chasing two records at once: a sixth consecutive weekend atop the North American box office, and the all-time domestic total held by "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" since December 2015. Heading into the four-day holiday frame, the Sony and Marvel Studios release needed roughly $45 million more to pass the Force Awakens' unadjusted domestic haul of $936.7 million, a gap industry trackers expected the film to close within days.
No movie has topped the weekend chart six times running since "Avatar: The Way of Water" strung together seven straight number-one finishes over the 2022-23 holidays. In its fifth weekend, "Brand New Day" added $22.2 million domestically, enough to hold off "Coyote vs. Acme" and a wave of new fall openers, and pushed its running domestic total past $891 million. The exact figure varied slightly by tracker: the-numbers.com and other services put the running domestic tally between $891 million and $896 million as of the Tuesday before Labor Day, a discrepancy typical of estimates filed before studios report final numbers.
A Record-Setting Run
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and starring Holland opposite Zendaya, Sadie Sink and Jon Bernthal, "Brand New Day" has broken records at nearly every stage of its run since opening July 31. Even its opening weekend was disputed by trackers: some outlets credited it with a $360 million three-day debut, edging past "Avengers: Endgame's" $357.1 million for the biggest domestic opening ever, while Variety's own count at the time put the figure closer to $355 million — enough for the second-biggest debut on record rather than the largest. By either measure, the film reached $700 million domestically faster than all but a handful of movies in history, becoming only the seventh film to cross that line, and hit $1 billion worldwide in just six days.
Globally, the film has climbed past $2.3 billion, pushing ahead of "Avatar: The Way of Water" for third place on the all-time worldwide chart, trailing only "Avatar" and "Endgame." That put it on pace, according to analysts tracking the Labor Day frame, to keep climbing through the holiday even as new counter-programming — the horror re-team "Onslaught" from A24, the long-shelved "Coyote vs. Acme" in its second week, and a 20th-anniversary "Cars" re-release — split what remained of the four-day audience.
A Decade-Old Record in Reach
The mark Holland is chasing has stood since "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" reintroduced the saga in 2015 and became the first film to cross $900 million domestically, a run that unfolded over a full year in theaters. Only "Avengers: Endgame" has come within striking distance of that total since. That "Brand New Day" is positioned to pass it roughly five weeks into its release, rather than over twelve months, has stood out to a trade press that spent the summer forecasting a solid but unremarkable outing for a Spider-Man film with no multiverse cameos or returning villains to sell.
Instead, reviews that praised Holland's performance and Cretton's handling of a more grounded, street-level story — paired with an unusually strong Cinemascore and steady weekday holds rather than the typical post-opening cliff — kept theaters full well into September. Sony has not disclosed a sequel timeline, but the studio's Spider-Man slate, including forthcoming spinoffs tied to the character, is likely to be reshaped by a film that has now outperformed the studio's own internal projections by a wide margin.
The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan's Homer adaptation, is playing out a quieter version of the same story: still in its eighth weekend, the film was projected to cross $600 million domestically later this month on the strength of a modest but stubborn afternoon-and-evening business, on its way to a worldwide total north of $1.5 billion. Between the two films, more than a fifth of Hollywood's 2026 domestic box office has flowed through a pair of studios' bets on a teenage superhero and a decades-old Greek epic — an outcome few forecasters had circled a year ago.
Whether "Brand New Day" finishes the four-day weekend as the outright domestic box-office champion of all time or simply comes close, the record chase itself has already reframed how the industry talks about a late-summer season that, entering July, some analysts worried would underperform. It has not.
