The third-best domestic second weekend in box office history now belongs to a Spider-Man movie. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day pulled an estimated $145 million in its second frame, and the math from here gets silly fast.
Domestic total: $655 million. International: $1.01 billion. Worldwide: $1.67 billion. That’s after two weekends.
The $2 billion question isn’t really a question
With plenty of weekends still ahead of it, the Destin Daniel Cretton-directed film looks all but locked for $2 billion. Clearing that bar means passing the lifetime gross of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is the kind of sentence that would have sounded absurd a few years ago.
Where it stops after that is genuinely unclear. Strong legs would drop it into Avatar and Avengers: Endgame territory. Beyond that sits $3 billion, a number no movie has ever reached.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. That’s a long, long way off, and Spider-Man isn’t even the only story this weekend.
Nolan just passed himself
Christopher Nolan has made Interstellar. He made the Dark Knight trilogy. And now The Odyssey, his nearly three-hour version of Homer’s 3,000-year-old Greek poem, has become the biggest movie of his career at $1.104 billion worldwide.
The old champ was The Dark Knight Rises at $1.084 billion, with The Dark Knight right behind at $1.008 billion. Nolan’s entire top tier is separated by less than $100 million, which tells you something about how consistently enormous his career has been.
This is only the film’s fourth weekend out. It opened to a historic $264 million worldwide, crossed $1 billion just last week, and dropped only 38% this time around after a 19% dip in weekend two. Those are not the numbers of a movie that’s done climbing.
Imax has a new king too
Imax reported $289.3 million from its screens worldwide, making The Odyssey the highest-grossing title in the format’s history. Fitting, given Nolan shot the entire movie using Imax technology. He built the thing for those screens and the receipts came back accordingly.
The cast overlap is doing a lot of work
The Odyssey stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Robert Pattinson as Antinous, Holland as Telemachus, Zendaya as Athena and Jon Bernthal as Menelaus, plus many, many more.
Holland, Zendaya and Bernthal all turn up in Brand New Day as well. Their co-stars there include Sadie Sink as someone the movie isn’t telling you about yet, Jacob Batalon as Ned, Michael Mando as Scorpion/Mac Gargan and Liza Colon-Zayas as Detective Jean DeWolff.
Three actors, two of the year’s biggest films, roughly $2.8 billion between them. Not a bad August.
Everyone else showed up too
Two new releases landed this weekend. One Night Only took an estimated $5.7 million domestically for third place, and Super Troopers 3 managed $4 million for fourth.
Respectable numbers in a normal month. This isn’t a normal month.
Nolan spent his career convincing studios that original spectacle shot on the biggest possible format was worth the money. A 3,000-year-old poem just became his highest-grossing movie, and it did it on the screens he insisted on using.
