Spider-Man: Brand New Day becomes the biggest success in US box office history

The Marvel blockbuster has just set the all-time record and surpassed Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But pay attention to the numbers…

Luke Skywalker will have lasted a decade at the top. But now he must bow to a spider-man…

Already the phenomenon of the year, with 2.4 billion dollars raised worldwide, Spider-Man: Brand New Day became, a few days ago, the third biggest success of all time at the global box office.

And since today, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is also the biggest success of all time at the North American box office.

After its seventh weekend, the blockbuster had reached $935.17 million as of Sunday evening. It took him two more days to glean another million and something. The weaver this evening reports 936.773 million dollars in revenue in US theaters and thus doubles Star Wars: The Force Awakenswhich held the record since 2015 with $936.6 million. Sony officially confirms this on its networks:

The question now is whether Brand New Day will have the momentum necessary to become the first film in history to pass the billion mark in North American cinemas. This seems unlikely at this point, given the current pace of the film… we’ll certainly have to wait for a possible theatrical release in a few years.

In the rest of the new ranking of the US box office of all time, we find on the podium Avengers: Endgame with 858 million dollars. SSpider-Man: No Way Home (814 million) and Avatar (785 million) complete the Top 5.

Be careful, however, not to take this ranking at face value (pun intended): these figures do not take inflation into account. The price of cinema tickets has increased enormously and the share of premium screenings like IMAX has exploded. Not to mention the evolution of American demographics, the number of rooms available, etc. So many factors which make the comparison between two piles of banknotes less and less meaningful for measuring popular phenomena from different eras. In France, where we traditionally think in terms of number of entries, it is much simpler. More telling too. THE New York Times therefore looked into this question by coming up with estimates of the number of tickets sold in North America. And there, the ranking changes radically.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day would have attracted a little more than 75 million spectators according to its estimates. An impressive figure, obviously, but one that seriously brings the Weaver back down from the wall of legends. Indeed, Gone with the Wind (1939) would have sold around 202 million tickets, then it is the very first Star Wars from 1977 which was reportedly seen by approximately 178 million fans. Further in this ranking, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) would have been seen by 108 million people. Suffice it to say that if SSpider-Man: Brand New Day dominates the official dollar rankings, that doesn’t mean it’s the most viewed film of all time in American theaters.