“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” and “The Odyssey” Team Up for a Record-Shattering Weekend
Peter Parker and Odysseus teamed up over the weekend and made history in the process.
Destin Daniel Cretton’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day swung to an incredible $355 million opening across 4,487 theaters in North America, the second-largest domestic launch in history. But that’s only half the picture at the theaters this past weekend, as Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey continued its mythic run, pulling in $51 million in its third weekend, a remarkable show of staying power, especially considering the excitement swirling around Tom Holland’s fourth Spidey movie. The two films, along with others playing in theaters, helped generate $430 million across all movies in the marketplace, a best-ever haul. Disney’s Toy Story 5 and Moana and Universal’s Minions & Monsters also contributed to the weekend frenzy.
It’s also a stunning achievement for Holland and Zendaya, who star in both films—Holland plays Telemachus in The Odyssey, while Zendaya reprises her role of MJ in Brand New Day and plays Athena in The Odyssey. (To be fair, Jon Bernthal is also in both films, playing Frank Castle/The Punisher in Brand New Day and Menelaus in The Odyssey.)
This tops the previous strongest weekend ever at the box office, which was led in 2019 by Avengers: Endgame ($402 million collectively), and before that, 2019’s Avengers: Infinity War ($314 million collectively).
“We have conquered a box-office milestone that seemed forever out of reach,” Paul Dergarabedian, Rentrak’s head of marketplace trends, told Variety. “This is now only the second $400 million-plus weekend in box office history.”
Brand New Day‘s opening weekend success was a mere $2 million behind the all-time biggest opening, Avengers: Endgame‘s $357 million. The film is set four years after the events in No Way Home, with Peter Parker now isolated thanks to a spell he had Doctor Strange cast at the end of the last film. That spell, which supposedly sealed tears in the multiverse, also ensured that Peter’s best friend and the love of his life, Ned (Jacob Batalon) and MJ (Zendaya), respectively, would have no memory of him. Peter was forced to make this decision after he botched Strange’s previous spell, tearing up the multiverse and pulling in alternate-universe versions of Peter Parker (played by Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire), as well as iconic villains like Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) and the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). Fans have been waiting five years to see what happened next in Spidey’s adventures, and they turned out in force.
Nolan’s The Odyssey is also based on existing IP—only this IP is nearly 3,000 years old. Nolan is one of the few directors alive who could turn an ancient poem, even one as monumentally groundbreaking as Homer’s, into box office gold. With Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as his wife Penelope, Holland as their son Telemachus, Robert Pattinson as the greasy suitor Antinous, Charlize Theron as the nymph Calypso, and Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and her sister, Clytemnestra, Himesh Patel as Eurylochus, and John Leguizamo as Eumaeus, Nolan’s film is a star-studded, insanely ambitious epic that has lured fans across state lines and national borders to see the film on the largest screens possible. Soon, The Odyssey will sail past Nolan’s The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises to become his highest-grossing film of all time.
Featured image: L-r: Zendaya and Tom Holland in “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.” Courtesy Sony Pictures; Matt Damon in “The Odyssey.” Courtesy Universal Pictures.
