There are box office milestones, and then there’s whatever is currently happening to Spider-Man. For over two decades, the wall-crawler has been Hollywood’s most reliable comic-book export outlasting reboots, surviving a multiverse-sized identity crisis, and somehow getting bigger with every fresh coat of web fluid.
Now, with Spider-Man: Brand New Day still playing in theaters worldwide, the numbers have made it official: Spider-Man has climbed past the Wizarding World to become the third highest-grossing movie and franchise on the planet, trailing only the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole and Star Wars. For a character who started as a black-and-white comic doodle by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1962, that is a genuinely staggering piece of pop-culture history.
What Is Spider-Man: Brand New Day About?
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), Brand New Day picks up in the aftermath of Spider-Man: No Way Home’s reality-scrambling finale, in which Peter Parker made the ultimate sacrifice: erasing himself from the world’s memory.
Brand New Day finds Peter rebuilding a life and an identity from scratch, forced to fight crime and confront a formidable new threat while the people he loves no longer remember he exists. It’s a premise that trades the trilogy’s coming-of-age innocence for something rawer and more isolating, and critics have responded to that shift, the film currently holds a strong score on Rotten Tomatoes. It arrived as one of Marvel’s most anticipated releases in years, both as Tom Holland’s fourth solo outing and as the connective tissue leading into December’s Avengers: Doomsday.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day – Budget and the Box Office
Sony reportedly spent $225 million to produce Brand New Day, not including marketing a significant but not outlandish figure for a modern tentpole of this scale. What that budget bought was one of the biggest openings in box office history: $355 million domestically and $927 million worldwide on its first weekend, the second-largest global debut ever behind only Avengers: Endgame. The film shattered records on the way there, too, posting the biggest domestic opening day, the biggest Thursday preview gross, and the fastest run to $400 million domestic in franchise history.
The momentum never really stopped. Brand New Day crossed $1 billion globally in just six days, the second-fastest film ever to do so and hit $2 billion in three weekends, joining an exclusive club that includes only Avatar, Avengers: Endgame, Titanic, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. As of its most recent weekend, the film’s worldwide total sits at roughly $2.35 billion, having already overtaken Endgame’s domestic haul to rank among the top handful of releases in North American box office history. It is now, unambiguously, the highest-grossing Spider-Man movie ever made, and Sony’s biggest release of all time.
That single film’s haul is also the reason the franchise math changed so dramatically. Before Brand New Day, the ten-film Spider-Man franchise had grossed roughly $9 billion worldwide, putting it just behind Harry Potter’s $9.6 billion. Add Brand New Day’s $2.35 billion, and Spider-Man’s franchise total surges past $11 billion comfortably ahead of Harry Potter’s ceiling and cementing its new spot at No. 3 globally, behind only the sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe (over $30 billion) and Star Wars (just above $10 billion).
And ultimately, all these factors combined make Spider-Man: Brand New Day the third highest grossing movie of all time, behind only Avatar and Avengers: Endgame.
Related Article – Spider-Man Just Did What No Avengers Movie Could in Seven Years
Avengers: Doomsday: What to Expect
If Brand New Day was this year’s earthquake, Avengers: Doomsday arriving December 18, 2026 is shaping up to be the aftershock felt across the entire MCU. Directed once again by Anthony and Joe Russo, the architects behind Endgame, the film pits a reassembled roster of Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the New Avengers, and even the X-Men against Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom, played as a chilling multiversal variant of Tony Stark. Advance ticket sales have already broken pre-release records, reportedly outpacing the first-day presales of several recent Marvel films combined.
Box office analysts largely expect Doomsday to be the biggest movie of the year, with some early industry projections placing its worldwide total north of $1.6 billion, and a genuine shot at challenging Endgame territory if reviews and word-of-mouth cooperate.
Given the sheer scale of its ensemble and the emotional stakes of closing out the Multiverse Saga before 2027’s Secret Wars, Doomsday enters the holiday corridor as close to a guaranteed event film as Hollywood produces anymore though whether it can out-earn Brand New Day’s head start remains one of the year’s more entertaining betting-market debates.
Tom Holland’s Future in the MCU
Here’s where things get murkier and more interesting. Despite years of speculation, Holland was notably absent from Avengers: Doomsday’s official cast reveal, and Marvel Studios has stayed tight-lipped on whether his Peter Parker factors into the film at all. Holland himself has admitted to being kept in the dark, saying the studio tends to withhold plot details from him given his history of accidentally spoiling projects. Some reports suggest a different Spider-Man variant may appear in Doomsday instead, while Holland’s own role could be saved for a bigger moment in Secret Wars.
As for a fifth solo film, Holland’s public stance has wavered. Asked in a rapid-fire interview whether he’d sign on for another Spider-Man movie without hesitation, his one-word answer was simply, “Pass” though he’s also spoken about wanting to eventually hand the mantle to a live-action Miles Morales, suggesting more nuance than a flat refusal.
Whatever comes next, one thing is clear: with Spider-Man now propping up a top-three global franchise almost single-handedly through Holland’s tenure, Marvel and Sony have every incentive to keep their most bankable hero swinging for years to come.
The Bottom Line
Spider-Man’s climb to third place isn’t a fluke or a one-summer sugar rush it’s the payoff of two decades of near-constant reinvention, from Sam Raimi’s earnest trilogy to Andrew Garfield’s underrated run to Holland’s genre-redefining MCU era. With Brand New Day still playing in theaters, Avengers: Doomsday on the horizon, and a fanbase that has shown zero signs of fatigue, Spider-Man isn’t just keeping pace with Hollywood’s biggest franchises it’s actively rewriting where the finish line is. If there’s one thing this year has proven, it’s that betting against your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is officially a losing game.
