Well, crikey. There was little doubt that Tom Holland’s fourth outing as Spider-Man would prove a popular movie, but was anyone expecting the film to bring in almost a billion dollars in its first three days? Box Office Mojo lists Spider-Man: Brand New Day as sitting on a worldwide gross of $927,000,000, making it the second-biggest opening for a movie ever (thanks GamesRadar). It’s also further confuses the question: what exactly is it that will now get people to show up to movie theaters?

So much has been written about the struggle movie theaters have faced since covid, trying to convince the wider public to return to confined spaces filled with other humans, at the same time as the streaming networks wove their roots deep into the soil. What will it take for people to be willing to buy a bucket of popcorn and sit in front of a big screen? In 2026 that has become even more confusing, with big, fun, and well-made movies like Masters of the Universe proving complete flops, while tiny indie horror flicks like Backrooms bring in hundreds of millions. Yet now, the once-flailing MCU has returned with the second-biggest movie of all time. Spider-Man. Brand New Day‘s opening weekend falls behind only 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, the absolute zenith of the MCU, which pulled in an eye-watering $1.2 billion on its first weekend.

And Spidey could still catch up in the U.S. Domestically, Brand New Day is currently sitting on $355 million which, as GamesRadar points out, is just $2.1 million behind Endgame‘s all-time record for biggest domestic opening weekend, and it’s possible that this line could be crossed as the last weekend ticket sales data comes in.

It’s been a full year since the last MCU movie was released, with The Fantastic Four: First Steps reaching just over $500 million in its lifetime, and $217 million in its global opening weekend. Solid numbers for most films, but well short of the billion that Marvel movies were regularly receiving at their peak. That followed 2025’s Captain America: Brave New World falling short of the half-billion mark, and Thunderbolts only making $382 million in its lifetime. While it perhaps still seemed possible that the hype for December’s Avengers: Doomsday would see life return to the franchise, it hadn’t been widely predicted that Spider-Man* would go this stratospheric.

To put it in context, Brand New Day has made more in its first three days than The Odyssey has made in its first three weeks. These are astronomical numbers, and they’re only going to send the movie studios into further confusion as they try to figure out the path forward. Only weeks ago we were hearing about Hollywood studios desperately trying to find creepypasta horrors they could license given that the post-Barbie attempt to make movies based on ’80s toys didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Massive franchise movies are dead! Long live the indie YouTube spin-offs! And now there’s a giant glob of web clogging up that thinking.

Trendy thinking

I really think trying to fathom this based on “trends” is a mistake, and one Hollywood is almost certain to continue making. People haven’t gone to see Brand New Day because of a particularly effective marketing campaign; the trailers have hid the film’s true villain or villains, and failed to express exactly what the story is going to be. No, folks have gone to see it because it’s Spider-Man, and Spider-Man is a lovely guy. People want to see Tom Holland being that really decent human being, winning the fun fights and dealing with the tough feels. The other Spider-Man movies have been incredibly fun, and who doesn’t want another one of those? Forget that it’s in the MCU, because that’s become so unwieldy and confusing as to be a massive distraction at this point.

Meanwhile, Moana has barely made a quarter-billion in three weeks because it looked like a sad photocopy of a lovely movie everyone’s already watched 32,000 times, and not because “Disney live-action movies are dead!” It was only last year that Lilo & Stitch grossed over a billion. Yet someone at Disney will be tearing up charts and PowerPoint presentations in despondency. This obsession with “trends” so wildly misses the point.

What makes people go to the movies? It seems pretty unguessable right now. But one might want to suggest that studios, instead of trying to chase the last thing that did surprisingly well, focus on letting creators make movies with passion. Attempting to follow a formula seems to be the surest sign of a flop at this point.