The studio is telling anyone who asks that Spider-Man: Brand New Day will open around $195M; but what we’re seeing in presales and tracking has it with a chance to hit $300M. One of them is about to be very wrong… and it’s not going to be us.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Spider-Man: Brand New Day did $72M in previews. That is the biggest preview night in history, bigger than Avengers: Endgame’s $60M, and it sets us up for a truly massive opening weekend. $320M is now the low end, not the high end, and the all-time opening-weekend record is genuinely in play.
One caveat: the $72M bundles in Amazon’s Prime Video early-access screenings on Wednesday night, and Thursday previews kicked off early at 12PM, so this is a Wednesday-plus-Thursday figure going up against pure Thursday previews, meaning it may carry a slightly lower preview→opening weekend multiplier than a clean comp would. Even still, this is enormous. Endgame’s $60M and Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ $57M were single nights, and Spider-Man: No Way Home managed $50M.
The useful number is the first Friday, and there the band is tight. Only five films have ever cleared $100M on opening Friday, and every one of them turned it into a weekend between 2.08x and 2.42x that Friday: Endgame ran 2.27x ($157.5M to $357.1M), Avengers: Infinity War 2.42x, No Way Home 2.13x, Force Awakens 2.08x, Star Wars: The Last Jedi 2.10x. Apply that band to a Friday in the $150M range and the weekend lands between $312M and $363M. Endgame’s $357.1M sits inside that.
So the call moves. $320M is the floor, $340M is the realistic middle, and the all-time record is genuinely in play — the first time that has been true since 2019.
Opening weekend ranges here are anything as low as $180M to as high as $300M+ — a huge divide. We are taking the high side, and we are not splitting the difference. Our forecast now points to over $300M, up from $280–310M on Tuesday, itself up from $230–250M a week earlier, and these revisions have been driven by the only hard data anybody actually has: presales. The trade estimates that keep getting quoted are very, very conservative here. Deadline has $180–190M, Box Office Theory landed at $249M on July 24, and Sony itself is out at $195M. The trackers watching seats sold, not sentiment, are at $300M+ and have been climbing all week. When the gap is this wide, side with the number that comes from transactions.
Here is what our range actually means. At $290M this would be the second-biggest opening in the history of the domestic box office, clearing Spider-Man: No Way Home’s $260.1M from 2021 and Avengers: Infinity War’s $257.7M, with only Endgame’s $357.1M above it. At $320M it is within striking distance of a record that has stood for seven years. It is also 2026’s biggest opening by roughly $130M over Toy Story 5’s $160.0M, which is not a race so much as a rewrite. And No Way Home turned its $260.1M start into $804.8M domestic; even ordinary legs on the low end of our band put this film past $700M and into the argument for the biggest domestic run since Endgame. Even if we assume extreme frontloading, it’s hard to see this anywhere below $650M as the domestic final.
What matters here is that people are genuinely interested in what happens as the next chapter in Holland’s Spider-Man story. No Way Home finished up with Peter Parker wiping the memory of himself from all the people he loved the most; naturally we all want to see what happens next. The trailers have sold that human element instead of focusing on big CGI battles, grounding the film and connecting to what people actually care about — the characters and the story. It also doesn’t hurt that No Way Home ended up with a mammoth $804M domestically (3rd biggest of all-time) and $1.92B worldwide (8th biggest of all-time). A lot of people saw the last one, a lot of people liked it, and a lot of people can’t wait to see what happens next. This time around, reviews are just as good at 91% Certified Fresh from 158 critics so far.
The overseas half is already reporting, and it is enormous. China opened Tuesday, ahead of the domestic date, and did a projected $37.4M on day one — the biggest superhero opening in that market in seven years. For scale, Venom: The Last Dance did $9.4M on its first day there in 2024, and Spider-Man: Far From Home, the last U.S. superhero film to clear $100M in China, opened to $98M for the full weekend on its way to $199M. Local analysts have the full China run at $255–265M. Stack that against a global launch that the conservative camp puts at $425M and the aggressive camp puts near $800M, and the second-biggest worldwide debut ever is genuinely on the table. Only Avengers: Endgame would sit ahead of it.
The Odyssey
Last week we argued that The Odyssey would hold strong in weekend two because Nolan owned every large-format screen in the country until Spider-Man took them on July 31. It held at -27%, the best second weekend of his career and the best hold for any film opening over $100M… ever. Now the real test happens: can it hold up against the blue whale that is Brand New Day? We’re going to argue it absolutely can and will, albeit with a larger drop this time around, just due to sheer competition for screens, especially large format/PLF. It should still survive a 50% slide, but we may be in store for something in the 40’s. That would give it a weekend approaching $50M+.
The chart is already telling us who this audience is. Monday and Tuesday were down just 21% and 24% from last week. On Discount Tuesday, The Odyssey rose 12% from Monday. Moana rose 75%, Minions & Monsters 72%, Toy Story 5 65%. That 12% is the smallest bump of any wide release in the top ten, and it is a compliment: this is a premium-format crowd paying premium prices that does not go looking for a $6 ticket. It is also precisely why the screen handoff bites harder here than it would for a film whose audience is buying on price. For context on the week-three baseline, Oppenheimer fell 37.6% on this same late-July frame in 2023, The Dark Knight 43.2%, Barbie 43.0%, and Deadpool & Wolverine 44.5% — none of them against a $290M+ opening.
$50M this frame puts The Odyssey around $385M in 19 days and moves it past Project Hail Mary’s $344.1M by Sunday and Michael’s $372.3M within days of that, taking third on the 2026 chart outright. After this weekend, it’s smooth sailing for Odysseus, and expect this to hang around all the way through August and into September. $500M was locked after last weekend, and we’re still expecting a finish somewhere around $550M, taking it past The Dark Knight’s $533M to become Nolan’s biggest film of all time. That being said, $600M is not out of the question by any stretch. Worldwide by Sunday should be approaching $900M with the billion mark set to be smashed next week as it shoots for Deadpool & Wolverine’s $1.3B all-time R-Rated record.
Toy Story 5
Third place is a genuine scrum this weekend, and Toy Story 5 should take it on the strength of holds as the default family movie for the rest of the summer. It fell 26% last frame, its softest drop of the run, and Spider-Man does not compete for its audience the way another family title would. It has already beaten the previous biggest in the franchise and already crossed $1B, so at this point it’s all gravy. While it probably won’t get all the way to $500M domestic, it should come close, crossing $480 at least. It’s still the top film domestically and worldwide for 2026, and will hold that title for another week or two before it drops down to third as Spider-Man and The Odyssey slam into and right past it.
Minions & Monsters
Minions & Monsters is the quietly profitable underdog. A $37.0M opening looked like a disappointment for the brand in early July; but three straight holds of -43%, -36% and -28% later it is at $159.5M on 4.3x legs and $418.2M worldwide against an $85M budget. Our model has it finishing at $194M, and the drops keep getting smaller rather than larger, which is the only reliable sign that a family title has found repeat business rather than a front-loaded opening. A hold near 30% this weekend gets it to roughly $166M and keeps $200M live. It could find its way close to half a billion worldwide when all is said and done.
Moana
We called $10–13M and a ~32% hold for Moana last week; it did $10.6M on a 41% drop, inside the range on the gross and softer on the hold than the other two family films. It should start falling behind them as the summer goes on; it’s clearly got the worst reception and will find itself with the worst final total. Our model finishes it at $128M domestic against a $250M budget, and no amount of open family calendar changes that arithmetic. It is a write-off that is behaving decently on its way down, which is a real distinction, just not a redeeming one. Good for cinemas; bad for Disney.
Hadestown: The Musical
Hadestown: The Musical did something on Tuesday that no other film in the top ten did: it fell. Down 17% to $1.8M while every wide release around it rose between 12% and 75% on the Discount Tuesday bump. That is the live-capture profile arriving early — a fixed, motivated theatre audience that turns out in the first four days and is largely spent by the second week. A 60% second-weekend drop is the base case, landing around $4M for a cume near $19M. Against a $5M budget on a 100% Tomatometer and a 99% audience score, this is already a substantial win for Bleecker Street and the biggest live-capture opening since Hamilton.
Looking ahead: August opens quiet by design, because nobody wanted to be standing next to this. Super Troopers 3 arrives August 7 with a $8–16M forecast, alongside Universal’s One Night Only, and neither is built to take a weekend off a Spider-Man second frame — which, if the opening lands where we think it does, will still be somewhere in the $100M range. The first title with a real claim on the chart is PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie on August 14, which finally gives the family lane something new after five weeks of Moana, Minions and Toy Story splitting it three ways.
Bottom line: this is the weekend the year gets decided in both directions at once. Anything over $260.1M and Spider-Man owns the second-biggest opening ever; anything over $300M and the Endgame record is a live conversation for the first time since 2019. And for The Odyssey, holding under -50% without its premium screens is the number that keeps a $550M domestic run on the table.
Two point nine million dollars. That is the margin by which Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s $360.0M opening weekend clears the all-time domestic record Avengers: Endgame had held since 2019. Sony gets the biggest opening weekend in history, the biggest opening day in history, and the biggest weekend the North American marketplace has ever recorded — and the only records left in front of it are the biggest domestic run in history, Star Wars: The Force Awakens’s $936.7M, and the $1 billion domestic barrier no film has ever cleared.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
The record is gone. Monday actuals put Sunday at $88.7M rather than the $84.2M Sony estimated and revised Friday up to $169.8M, which finalizes the weekend at $360.0M — $2.9M past Avengers: Endgame’s $357,115,007 and the biggest opening weekend in the history of the domestic box office. The record that stood for seven years is officially broken.
The shape of it is not what yesterday’s estimates suggested. Endgame still won two of the three days — $109.3M to $101.5M on Saturday, $90.4M to $88.7M on Sunday — and lost the weekend anyway, because the $169.8M Friday beat it by $12.3M. The revision also flips the most useful signal on the board: Brand New Day’s Sunday fell just 12.6% from Saturday against Endgame’s -17.3%, the shallowest Sunday hold of any film in the top ten this weekend. A $360M opening that surrenders that little on Sunday is not a front-loaded one, and that is good news for the legs from here on out.
We have Brand New Day landing between 2.5x and 3.0x its opening, which is a domestic range of $900M–$1.08B — the same band we laid out yesterday, now anchored to a bigger number. The floor is set by Avengers: Endgame’s 2.40x, the least leggy run any $200M-plus opener has ever had, and the ceiling by Spider-Man: No Way Home’s 3.09x, which had Christmas doing a lot of the lifting. Brand New Day has better reviews than either, an A CinemaScore, a 98% audience score, and a pretty barren August calendar ahead of it, with nothing wide against it until PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie on the 14th, meaning there’s a very high chance this keeps the top daily/weekend spot for the whole month and into September.
That range is worth saying out loud, because of what sits inside it. Star Wars: The Force Awakens has held the all-time domestic record at $936.7M since 2015; Brand New Day needs 2.60x to take it, and 2.78x to become the first film in history to gross $1 billion in North America. Both of those are inside our band and neither is at the top of it. $800M is locked, $900M is close to locked, the all-time domestic record is now more likely than not, and $1B domestic — a number no film has ever reached — is a real conversation for the first time in history. Next weekend will be the first real tell for whether it lands closer to $900M or heads past $1B.
We called $290–320M on Wednesday and said Sony’s own $195M number was going to be badly wrong; it was, although in the other direction from ours. Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened to $360.0M, the biggest weekend in history, $2.9M past Avengers: Endgame and $99.9M clear of Spider-Man: No Way Home in third — a gap larger than the one separating third place from tenth.
The $169.8M Friday is the biggest single day the domestic box office has ever had, past Endgame’s $157.5M, and the $72M preview night that fed it is also the biggest ever, past Endgame’s $60M. Saturday’s $101.5M is the second-biggest Saturday on record behind Endgame’s $109.3M. EntTelligence counted 24.1 million admissions, an all-time high for the era it has tracked and well past No Way Home’s 20 million, and the per-theater average came in at $80,232 across 4,487 sites. Sony did all of it without a single IMAX screen.
One caveat belongs on the opening-day record and not on the others: that $72M bundled Amazon Prime Video early-access screenings on Wednesday night and a noon Thursday start, against Endgame’s pure post-6PM previews, so the single-day mark isn’t quite apples-to-apples even though the three-day is. That distinction matters more than it sounds, because through Saturday the two films were running almost identically.
Back the previews out of both and the opening Fridays are separated by about $300,000 on a $97M day — Brand New Day $97.8M, Endgame $97.5M — and Saturday went the other way, with Endgame growing 12% off its pure Friday to $109.3M while Brand New Day grew only 4% to $101.5M. That is the trade you make for a record preview night: some of Saturday’s business gets spent on Thursday. What settled the record was the two ends of the weekend, the $12.3M Friday advantage and a Sunday that held four and a half points better.
For franchise context, Brand New Day opened bigger than Spider-Man: Homecoming and Spider-Man: Far from Home did combined ($209.6M) by $145M, and it made more in three days than Spider-Man 3 managed across its entire 2007 run ($337M), finishing within $49M of what Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man earned over five months in 2002. Tom Holland’s four solo openings now read $117.0M, $92.6M, $260.1M and $360.0M, which is less a progression than two different businesses stacked on top of each other.
To put that against the rest of the year, only four of the ninety-five 2026 releases we track have grossed more than $360M across their entire runs — Toy Story 5 ($461.7M), The Super Mario Galaxy Movie ($429.8M), The Odyssey ($395.5M) and Michael ($372.3M) — and Brand New Day will be past all four inside a week. Worldwide it opened to $932M, $572M of that overseas with $121M from China alone in a market No Way Home was never cleared to play, making it the second-biggest global debut ever behind Endgame’s $1.224B and $292M clear of third. Against a $225M net budget it was profitable somewhere around Friday lunchtime.
Where it finishes is the harder question, although the reception argues for patience: an A CinemaScore, a 98% audience score — the best of the nine live-action Spider-Man films — and a 90% Tomatometer is the profile of a film that plays for a month rather than one that dumps its audience into four days. Our model reads $1.11B domestic on 3.08x legs and we’re going to take the under on that, because no superhero film has ever legged past 3.01x off a $200M-plus opening and the two closest analogues ran 2.40x (Endgame, $858.4M) and 3.09x (No Way Home, $804.8M, with Christmas doing most of that work).
Even if it might not reach those heights, Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ all-time record of $936M is absolutely in play here. $800M is all but locked, since it should hold up better than Endgame did, putting it on course for somewhere between $900M–$1.08B… from domestic alone. If it wants to break the $1B mark, it needs a 2.8x multiplier… which is actually not that hard to imagine. No Way Home managed 3.1x in the famously leggy Christmas corridor. We’ll see how this plays out. Either way, this is guaranteed to become, at a minimum, one of the three biggest films of all time domestically.
The Odyssey
We called $48–57M and said The Odyssey would survive a 50% slide with something in the forties more likely, and that is exactly what happened: $51.0M on a -43% third weekend, the biggest third frame of Nolan’s career. The drop itself is ordinary — The Dark Knight fell 43.2% on the same beat and Oppenheimer only 37.6% — but neither of those had a $360M opening landing on top of them. What saved it is the format split: Brand New Day never played IMAX at all, so Nolan kept every IMAX screen in the country and surrendered only the Dolby, ScreenX and 4DX houses, which is a very different handover from losing the premium base outright.
The cume is $395.5M through 17 days, and the film passed Oppenheimer’s entire $329.9M lifetime domestic gross in 13. Our model moved to Phase 3 this weekend and now reads $533–609M with a $567M midpoint on 4.6x legs, and if that lands The Odyssey becomes the highest-grossing film of Christopher Nolan’s career, clearing The Dark Knight’s $534.9M having opened $35M lighter. $500M is locked.
Overseas it is running just as hard, adding $85.2M in its third weekend for a $911.4M global cume that pushed Universal past $4 billion in worldwide box office for the year, and the film is already the third-biggest IMAX release of all time. $1B lands this week with China still to come, and Deadpool & Wolverine’s $1.3B R-rated record is the only target left after that.
Toy Story 5
We called $7–8M for the family scrum and Toy Story 5 came in under at $6.3M on a -38% hold, with Minions & Monsters only $500K behind it. Losing 340 theaters into a 4,487-site Spider-Man expansion explains most of the miss, and a -38% seventh weekend against the biggest opening in seven years is a good result on its own terms. The cume is $461.7M and the run is now essentially decided: $480M is comfortable, and $500M is really a question of whether it is still in enough theaters come Labor Day to get there — the weekday holds have never been the problem with this one.
The crown is about to change hands, though: Toy Story 5 has been 2026’s #1 domestic release for six weeks, and Brand New Day, $101.7M behind it after three days, will be past it before next Sunday and past The Odyssey’s $395.5M on the way. Worldwide it holds on a little longer at $1.066B, still the biggest film on the planet this year and now the fifth-biggest Pixar release ever — it went past Zootopia ($1.027B), Finding Dory ($1.030B), Despicable Me 3 ($1.035B) and Moana 2 ($1.060B) inside a single frame to get there.
Minions & Monsters
We called $6.5–7.5M on a roughly 30% hold; Minions & Monsters did $5.8M on -41%, its first frame in a month where the drop got worse instead of better. That is a screen story rather than an audience story — it shed 363 theaters — and the cume still landed at $168.4M, ahead of the ~$166M we penciled in. Four holds of -43%, -36%, -28% and now -41% off a $37.0M opening is a 4.6x multiplier, and our model has it finishing at $194M. Worldwide it is at $449.6M against an $85M budget, and half a billion global now looks more like a formality than a stretch.
Moana
Moana fell to fifth on a -50% fourth weekend, the steepest drop in the top five, and it lost 1,005 theaters doing it — by far the largest cut on the chart and roughly a quarter of its footprint in one week. That is exhibitors making a judgment, and the judgment is right: it is now behind both Toy Story 5 and Minions & Monsters weekly despite opening ahead of the latter. Our model finishes it at $128M domestic. Worldwide is $261.1M against a $250M budget, and there is no version of the remaining run that gets that to break even.
I Want Your Sex
The only wide-ish counterprogramming of the weekend, and it landed almost exactly where the specialty market said it would. I Want Your Sex did $600K on 700 screens for an $857 average — within a rounding error of what Her Private Hell did seven days earlier ($538K on 675 screens for Neon). Two R-rated arthouse acquisitions, two nearly identical numbers, one week apart. An 89% Tomatometer on Gregg Araki’s first film in a decade does not move a needle in a weekend where 82% of every dollar spent in an American cinema went to one movie.
Below the openers the chart is mostly Spider-Man’s exhaust. The Invite lost 1,240 theaters and fell -53% to $1.24M for $22.8M. Young Washington dropped -75% but posted the biggest Friday-to-Saturday jump in the top ten at +58%, the signature of a film squeezed out of its Friday showtimes and clawing back on matinees. The genuine oddity is Backrooms: on 85 screens it was the only film in the chart to rise week-over-week (+5% to $332K) and the only one to fall on Saturday (-3%), for a $3,902 per-theater average second only to Spider-Man’s. It sits $2.7M from $200M domestic.
Above all of it the market itself set a record, with the North American box office doing roughly $439M across all releases, past the $402M the entire industry managed during Endgame’s opening frame in April 2019 and nearly triple last weekend’s $145.8M. Whatever anyone wants to say about theatrical, the biggest weekend in the history of the American box office just happened.
Looking ahead, next weekend is a landing strip. Universal’s One Night Only and Searchlight’s Super Troopers 3 — the latter tracking $8–16M — open into whatever Brand New Day leaves behind, which on the evidence of this weekend will not be much. The interesting number will be Spider-Man’s second-weekend drop, because it decides whether the all-time domestic record is a target or a formality.