Spider-Man's US record beats Star Wars on a third fewer tickets

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has sold about 70 million cinema tickets in the United States and Canada. Star Wars: The Force Awakens sold about 111 million. The film with the smaller audience now holds the record.

Sony's picture closed Sunday on $935,181,631, which left it $1,480,594 short of the $936,662,225 that The Force Awakens finished on in 2016, per Box Office Mojo. It took $2,563,236 on the Sunday alone. Collider reported that it went past on Monday. Box Office Mojo had not posted Monday's actuals when this was written and Sony has issued no statement, but the arithmetic was never in question.

We flagged the gap on Monday. This is the part the announcement will leave out.

Divide each gross by the price of a ticket

The Numbers puts the average American cinema ticket at $8.43 in 2015 and $13.29 across 2026 so far. That is a rise of 58 per cent in eleven years, and it is most of this record.

The Force Awakens first. Its $936,662,225 at $8.43 comes to 111.1 million admissions. Brand New Day next: $935,181,631 at $13.29 comes to 70.4 million. The difference is 40.7 million tickets.

Pick a friendlier price and the conclusion survives. EntTelligence has this year's average at $12.75, which lifts Brand New Day to 73.3 million seats. Box Office Mojo runs its own inflation table in 2022 money. It estimates 108,115,100 admissions for the Star Wars film, and ranks that eleventh of all time behind Gone with the Wind, Jaws and eight others. Set the kindest figure for Sony against the least kind for Disney and the shortfall is still 34.8 million.

Put it the other way round. To have seated as many people as The Force Awakens did, Brand New Day would have needed roughly $1.48bn in North America. It has $935m.

We ran the same sum on The Odyssey on Saturday. This is not a Spider-Man problem. A nominal box office record is a measurement of what a ticket costs, and the trades print it every year as though it were a measurement of how many people turned up.

The number that defends the film

The ticket-count argument is usually made lazily, and it has a second half that nobody runs.

The Numbers has the domestic market on course for 769.2 million admissions in 2026, against 1,336,743,967 in 2015. The North American cinema audience has shrunk by about 42 per cent in eleven years.

Now take the share. The Force Awakens accounted for 8.3 per cent of every ticket sold in the United States and Canada in 2015. Brand New Day has taken 9.1 per cent of the tickets sold so far this year, or 9.5 per cent on the lower price estimate.

So the new record holder sold tens of millions fewer seats and captured a larger slice of the year than the film it passed. That is the harder thing to do, not the easier one. Gathering close to a tenth of everybody who went to the cinema in 2026 into a single title is the genuinely unusual achievement here, and it is not the one that will be in the press release, because it requires admitting how small the market has become.

There is a second reason this record is not a trick of pricing. Two films have now cleared $900m in North America. The next best is Avengers: Endgame on $858,373,000, which has sat $78m short of the record since 2019, and behind it Spider-Man: No Way Home on $814,866,759, Top Gun: Maverick on $721,996,984 and Avatar: The Way of Water on $688,459,501. Ticket prices climbed through all of them and none came near. Inflation on its own does not manufacture a $935m film, or there would be a dozen of them by now.

Forty-six days against a hundred and sixty-eight

Speed is where the comparison stops flattering 2015.

Brand New Day opened wide on 31 July. Monday was day 46. The Force Awakens needed 168 days of release to reach $936,662,225, a run that began on 18 December 2015 and did not close until the following summer.

The older film took the record faster than it set it. Disney announced on 6 January 2016 that The Force Awakens had passed Avatar's $760.5m lifetime domestic gross on day 20 of release. It then spent five more months grinding out the last $176m. Destin Daniel Cretton's film has been front-loaded from the first hour: $72m in previews and a $360.1m opening weekend, both records, as CNBC reported. Deadline had it as only the second film ever past $900m domestically. Variety tracked six straight weekends at number one.

It lost the seventh.

Where the run actually ends

The film that took the top spot was Practical Magic 2, which opened to $30,002,526 on 4,146 screens. Our own preview had it heading for $40m. It came in a quarter below that, and the projection was wrong.

Brand New Day fell from $18,178,872 over the Labor Day weekend to $8,410,743 on 3,303 screens last weekend, a drop of 53.7 per cent. Halve the weekend take every week from here, add midweek business at the rate it has been running, and the film finishes somewhere around $950m.

$1bn domestic is $63m away. On that curve it does not get there, and no release ever has.

Worldwide the total is $2,451,432,584, third of all time behind Avatar and Avengers: Endgame, on a reported $225m production budget. That is 10.9 times the negative cost, which is the figure Sony will actually care about.

Box Office Mojo posts Monday's actuals this week, and a record that stood for ten years and eight months becomes a line in a table.