Spider-Man: Brand New Day is $1.5m from the biggest US gross ever

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has stopped being the number one film in America. It is $1,491,337 short of being the biggest one ever released there.

Through Sunday the film stood at $935,170,888 in North America, according to Box Office Mojo. Star Wars: The Force Awakens has held that record since 2015 with $936,662,225. Nothing about the gap is safe. It closes this week.

The film that knocked it off the top is the smaller story. Practical Magic 2 opened to $30m from 4,146 cinemas, the bottom of Warner Bros.' own $30m to $35m range and short of the $40m the tracking pointed to when we looked at the weekend on Saturday. The Associated Press put the overseas take at $16m from 77 markets, giving the film $46m worldwide against a $75m production budget.

What the six-weekend streak was measuring

Six straight weekends at number one is rare, and Variety noted that the last film to manage it was Avatar: The Way of Water, which held seven in 2022. Part of that is the film. Part of it is that August handed it almost nothing to beat, which is the supply story we wrote about at the end of the summer.

Sony and Marvel get the record either way, and they get it in a week when they are no longer the most popular film in the country. That is a strange way to enter the history books. It is also, in fairness, the shape of most durable hits.

Why the inflation argument does not quite work here

The standard answer to a nominal box office record is that it is really a ticket-price record. We made exactly that case about The Odyssey on Saturday. It fits this one less comfortably.

Brand New Day passed $900m in North America in 36 days. The Force Awakens needed 50, Variety reported, and Deadline had it as only the second film ever to cross $900m domestically at all. Slower dollars are inflated dollars. These were not slow.

Admissions remain the harder measure, and they always will be. World of Reel estimated Brand New Day at roughly 75 million tickets sold, against 108 million for The Force Awakens and 137 million for Titanic, figures worked back from average ticket prices rather than counted at the door. Both readings are true at once. The record changing hands this week is a money record, and it is being taken faster than the money record has ever been taken.

Worldwide, Box Office Mojo has the film on $2,451,170,888, third of all time behind Avatar on $2,923,710,708 and Avengers: Endgame on $2,799,439,100. Domestically the distance is starker. The next Marvel title on the all-time North American list, Avengers: Endgame, sits at $858,373,000, some $77m adrift.

The rest of the chart

Brand New Day took $8.4m in its seventh weekend, down 53.8%. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey added $7.4m in its ninth for $600,507,275 in North America and $1.68bn worldwide, a hold most films two months old would take gratefully. Coyote vs. Acme dropped 65.7% to $4.1m.

The new releases underneath were thin. Runner opened to $6,432,956, Hope to $3.3m and The Uprising to $3.25m.

Warner Bros. and a 28-year wait

Practical Magic 2 is a $75m film with a $46m worldwide opening and reviews its own studio will not be printing on the poster. Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold. The arithmetic from here is not generous.

Variety worked out that the 1998 Practical Magic opened to $13m, about $27m in today's money. Twenty-eight years, two returning stars and a full sequel campaign have bought Warner Bros. an extra $3m in real terms. The studio is calling a number one opening a win, which is one way to describe it.

Media analyst Paul Dergarabedian, quoted by the Associated Press, was more patient than that. "It's not necessarily about that opening weekend," he said. "Weekend two will tell the tale, no question about it." He has a point. A sequel selling itself on affection for a film older than most of its audience lives or dies on word of mouth, and the second-weekend drop is where that shows up.

Comscore put the year to date at $7.5bn, up 19.2% on 2025, per the Associated Press.

The gap on the domestic record is $1,491,337. On the weekday grosses Brand New Day has been posting, that is about two days.