Spider-Man: Brand New Day breaks Avengers: Endgame's opening weekend record with $360m debut

Dubai: For most of Sunday it looked like the record would survive. Sony's own projections had Spider-Man: Brand New Day finishing its opening weekend at $355 million, about $2 million short of the mark Avengers: Endgame set in 2019.

Then Monday's actuals arrived and the picture changed. The final figure is $360 million from 4,487 North American screens, past Endgame's $357.1 million, and the biggest domestic opening in the history of the medium.

Sony had projected $84 million for Sunday. It took $88.7 million.

How the weekend broke down

Every day of it set something.

The Thursday previews took $72 million, itself a record, comfortably ahead of the $60 million Endgame managed in 2019.

Friday brought $169.3 million including presales, the biggest single day the box office has ever recorded. The previous mark was Endgame's $157.4 million.

Saturday added $101.5 million, and Sunday closed it out at $88.7 million.

Brand New Day and Endgame are now the only two films in history to have crossed $300 million in a single weekend, and they sit roughly $100 million clear of everything below them.

The worldwide number

Globally the film opened to $932 million, revised up from earlier estimates.

That is the second-biggest worldwide debut ever and still some distance behind Endgame, which opened to $1.22 billion. A billion dollars in total gross is likely within days rather than weeks.

For context on how large that is against its own franchise: No Way Home opened to $260.1 million domestically and $587.2 million worldwide in December 2021, and went on to make $1.9 billion.

What Sony said

Tom Rothman, chairman of Sony Pictures, put out a statement on Monday morning. "Wow! 360 million thank-yous to all the filmmakers, actors, producers, and to my colleagues at Sony, who created such a fantastic film and an exceptional marketing and distribution campaign," he said. "Records are made to be broken, but we will take great pride in this one, for as long as we hold it."

It is also the highest-grossing opening of any kind in Sony's history.

The weekend everyone else had

The more remarkable statistic may be the industry-wide one.

Combined with the rest of the chart, the weekend delivered around $435 million in North American ticket sales, the biggest box office weekend ever recorded.

Second place went to The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan's film, which also stars Tom Holland and Zendaya, and which took $51 million in its third weekend. That is a drop of 43 per cent and the 16th-best third weekend of all time. After 17 days it has taken $395.5 million domestically, with nearly 61 per cent of that coming from Imax screenings.

Toy Story 5, Minions & Monsters and Moana rounded out the top five, none of them clearing $7 million.