A Spider-Man film now holds the third-biggest domestic second weekend the box office has ever recorded. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day brought in an estimated $145 million in frame two, and from here the arithmetic turns ridiculous in a hurry.
Two weekends in, the tallies read: $655 million domestic, $1.01 billion international, $1.67 billion worldwide.
The $2 billion question isn’t really a question
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, the film has weekends to spare and looks essentially guaranteed to reach $2 billion. Crossing that line would put it past the lifetime gross of Spider-Man: No Way Home — a sentence that would have read as nonsense not so long ago.
What happens after that is anyone’s guess. Hold on to strong legs and it lands in the neighbourhood of Avatar and Avengers: Endgame. Past those sits $3 billion, territory no film has ever entered.
Best not to run too far ahead. That milestone is a long, long way out — and Spider-Man isn’t the only headline the weekend produced.
Nolan just passed himself
Christopher Nolan’s filmography includes Interstellar and the Dark Knight trilogy. Now The Odyssey — his roughly three-hour take on Homer’s 3,000-year-old Greek poem — sits atop his career at $1.104 billion worldwide.
It unseats The Dark Knight Rises and its $1.084 billion, with The Dark Knight trailing closely at $1.008 billion. Fewer than $100 million separate Nolan’s three biggest films, which says plenty about how reliably enormous his career has been.
And this is only weekend four. The film launched to a historic $264 million worldwide, went past $1 billion just last week, and slipped only 38% this time out following a 19% decline in its second weekend. A movie posting those figures is not finished climbing.
Imax has a new king too
Imax logged $289.3 million across its screens globally, which makes The Odyssey the format’s biggest earner ever. That tracks, considering Nolan shot the whole film on Imax technology. He designed it for those screens, and the grosses answered in kind.
The cast overlap is doing a lot of work
The ensemble of The Odyssey features Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Robert Pattinson as Antinous, Holland as Telemachus, Zendaya as Athena and Jon Bernthal as Menelaus, along with many, many more.
Holland, Zendaya and Bernthal each appear in Brand New Day too. Alongside them there: Sadie Sink in a role the film is keeping quiet for now, Jacob Batalon as Ned, Michael Mando as Scorpion/Mac Gargan and Liza Colon-Zayas as Detective Jean DeWolff.
Two of the year’s largest films, three shared actors, something like $2.8 billion between the pair. August has treated them well.
Everyone else showed up too
The weekend brought two fresh releases. One Night Only claimed third with an estimated $5.7 million domestically, while Super Troopers 3 took fourth on $4 million.
Those are perfectly decent figures for an ordinary month. This month is not ordinary.
Nolan built a career on persuading studios that original spectacle, captured on the largest format available, justified the spend. A poem written 3,000 years ago has now become his highest-grossing movie — and it got there on the screens he refused to compromise on.