Spider-Man: Brand New Day Passed Star Wars: The Force Awakens as the Highest-Grossing Film Ever at the US Box Office

Sony and Marvel's Spider-Man: Brand New Day passed Star Wars: The Force Awakens on the all-time domestic box office chart this week, ending an eleven-year hold on the record that the 2015 film set with 936.6 million dollars in the United States and Canada. Deadline and Variety both confirm the film crossed the threshold on its 47th day in release, and Variety's running tally puts its domestic total at roughly 944.5 million dollars, making it the highest-grossing film of 2026 in North America.

How it built the total

The film opened with a record-breaking 360 million dollars domestically and 932 million dollars globally in its first weekend, one of the largest openings ever recorded, and it reached 2 billion dollars worldwide within three weeks, the second-fastest film to do so. What is unusual is not the opening, which several superhero and franchise films have matched or exceeded in recent years, but the way it kept earning afterwards: Movieguide's tracking notes it is the first film since Avatar: The Way of Water to top the North American weekend chart for six consecutive weekends, and the first since Deadpool & Wolverine to still be number one in its sixth week, a sign of unusually strong word of mouth rather than front-loaded opening-weekend hype.

What the record does and does not mean

The Force Awakens set its total in 2015 dollars without the benefit of the higher average ticket prices of 2026, so a straight dollar comparison somewhat understates how large its inflation-adjusted total remains relative to Brand New Day's; box office analysts have long noted that nominal domestic records tend to fall roughly every decade for this reason, aided by ticket price inflation as much as by audience size. What the six-weekend run at number one does establish, independent of the inflation question, is that the film found an audience willing to return to cinemas repeatedly rather than watch once and move to streaming, at a moment when major studios have spent much of the past two years worrying publicly about exactly that habit.

Context

The record arrives in the same week as heavy diplomatic and technology news, Xi Jinping's state visit to Washington and Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 launch among them, and it is a reminder that the film industry's biggest story of the year has been running in parallel to all of it, largely off the front pages of the outlets covering Washington and Silicon Valley. Sony has not confirmed a sequel, though a franchise performing this far above its predecessors makes one close to a formality.