‘Spider-Man’ tops box office in fourth weekend

Spider-Man: Brand New Day fought off a slew of newcomers, including a comedy, a horror franchise, a Jason Statham action movie, and a family pic, to maintain its first-place spot at the box office in its fourth weekend in theatres. The Odyssey also became Christopher Nolan’s highest grossing movie ever, both domestically and internationally.

For the year, The Odyssey is second only to Spider-Man, which added $39 million from 4,006 theatres in the US and Canada, according to studio estimates Sunday. Spider-Man, which has now made over $854.9 million in North America, will soon surpass Avengers: Endgame to become the second highest-grossing domestic release of all time.

Sony also had the second biggest movie of the weekend with Insidious: Out of the Further. Third place went to The Odyssey, which earlier this week became the highest grossing R-rated movie of all time, surpassing Deadpool & Wolverine.

The other big newcomers landed further down the charts. Mutiny, starring Statham as a man wrongly accused of murdering his billionaire boss, opened in sixth place with $7.5 million from 2,703 locations. The Lionsgate release (an acquisition) was intended to be a theatrical only release but, a few days before it opened, it was accidentally available for free on Prime Video for a few hours before the mistake was remedied. The glitch might have impacted its opening weekend earnings, but the film also had some fairly bad reviews working against it.

Women accounted for some 84 per cent of opening weekend ticket buyers, according to PostTrak.

The summer season, which runs through Labour Day, has now generated an estimated $4.4 billion in ticket sales in North America, putting it among the top four highest-grossing summers ever.

“We’re in the home stretch of what I think will go down in box office history as maybe one of the most key and pivotal summer movie seasons ever,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the head of marketplace trends for Rentrak. “I don’t know how you can replicate this summer. Studios will try.”

Michael O’Leary, the president and CEO of the movie theatre trade organisation Cinema United, noted the wide variety of movies in the marketplace that have helped contribute to a big summer. Part of that, he told The Associated Press, was that the industry pipeline is finally bouncing back from the effects of the Hollywood strikes in 2023.

“The thing that I’m most excited about, frankly, is just the enthusiasm of moviegoers,” O’Leary said. “You feel it when you go to the theatre. There’s an energy about being in the theatre that hasn’t been there in the recent past.”

The year overall has also surpassed $7 billion, which is up about 20.4 per cent from 2025, but about 7.1 per cent behind 2019.