Swinging Past the Avengers: How “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” Toppled “Endgame’s” Opening Weekend Record
All hail King Peter.
Now that the final numbers have come in, it’s official—Spider-Man: Brand New Day has just swung its way to the biggest opening weekend in film history. Tom Holland’s fourth turn as Peter Parker, after a five-year hiatus since Jon Watts’ No Way Home, has topped the Russo Brothers’ 2019 epic Avengers: Endgame, earning an astonishing $360 million domestic haul.
It once seemed impossible to top No Way Home, which featured not only Holland’s Peter Parker and Zendaya’s MJ, but Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield reprising their versions of Peter Parker in a multiverse mega-event that pitted all three Spideys against iconic villains from franchises past. The result of all that multiversal mayhem was that Peter had to make the ultimate sacrifice by the film’s end—he enlisted Doctor Strange to cast a spell that would erase Spider-Man’s identity from everyone on Earth, including MJ, the love of his life, and his best friend, Ned (Jacob Batalon).
It was from this lonely, isolated position that director Destin Daniel Cretton and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers found their darker, deeper film. Instead of trying to outdo the pyrotechnics of the multiversal story in No Way Home, they drilled down on Peter’s loneliness and crafted a film centered on his love for MJ and his friends and on the loneliness of fighting a new, terrifying threat without their support.
The result made history.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Sony Pictures chief Tom Rothman was feeling buoyant after the history-making weekend. “All the geniuses who said that theatrical movies were dead, they’re not necessarily right. Actually, the theatrical marketplace is booming right now, and I’m excited about it. So I’m very optimistic.”
Rothman admitted that tackling the fourth installment after the thrilling success of No Way Home presented a real challenge.
“[Initially,] the problem for a while was, ‘How do you top that?’” he told THR. “What do we do next when we just put in all our Spider-Men? The strategic decision was — rather than trying what we all thought would be perhaps an empty effort of going quote, unquote bigger — we just went deeper. That was a very conscious choice to focus on how we could make the audience feel. We were fortunate enough to have a director who was able to balance emotion and spectacle.”
As for whether Holland will return for a fifth swing as Spider-Man, the actor himself recently told THR at the premiere that he’d “play Spider-Man for as long as they’d have me.” Rothman, meanwhile, said that when he heard that, “I jumped for joy. All I will say is that hope springs eternal. I really hope so.”
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in theaters now.
