The Force Awakens Has Held the Domestic Box Office Record for Ten Years. Spider-Man Takes It This Week.

The most durable record in American moviegoing is about to fall, and it is going to fall on a random weekend in September. Star Wars: The Force Awakens finished its run in 2016 with $936,662,225 in domestic ticket sales. Nothing has come within $75 million of that number in the decade since. Avengers: Endgame tried in 2019 and stalled at $858 million. Spider-Man: No Way Home tried in 2021 and stopped at $814 million.

Then Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened on July 31 and did $360 million in three days. Through Labor Day Monday it sits at $923,062,495 domestic, according to Box Office Mojo, after a four-day holiday frame of $23.3 million that was actually up 3.5 percent on the weekend before. The gap to the record is $13.6 million. It is still playing in 3,520 theaters. Unless every projector in the country breaks, the top of the all-time chart changes hands within days.

The record it is taking

The Force Awakens opened December 18, 2015 to $247.97 million, which was itself the biggest opening of all time back then. What made it a monster was the calendar: it landed a week before Christmas and rode school holidays for a month. It crossed $900 million about 50 days into its run and kept playing into June, 167 days in all. That is the profile of a marathon runner.

Brand New Day is a sprinter that learned to run distance. It reached $900 million in 36 days, two full weeks faster. Its opening weekend was $112 million bigger than the Star Wars film's. And its drops, which should have been brutal for a front-loaded superhero release, got gentler every single weekend: down 59.9 percent, then 50.9, then 44.9, then 42.3, then up. Destin Daniel Cretton's film is behaving like the audience keeps finding new reasons to go back. We broke down the opening in our summer box office scorecard; the leg it has grown since is the more surprising story.

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The all-time domestic chart, as of Labor Day

Here is the top ten on the unadjusted domestic list right now. Read it as a ranking and a few things jump out.

1. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015): $936.7 million
2. Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026): $923.1 million, and climbing
3. Avengers: Endgame (2019): $858.4 million
4. Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021): $814.9 million
5. Avatar (2009): $785.2 million
6. Top Gun: Maverick (2022): $722.0 million
7. Black Panther (2018): $700.4 million
8. Avatar: The Way of Water (2022): $688.5 million
9. Avengers: Infinity War (2018): $678.8 million
10. Titanic (1997): $674.4 million

Once the swap happens, Marvel Studios will have a hand in five of the top ten, and two of the top four will be Spider-Man movies starring the same actor. James Cameron holds three spots with three different decades of film. And Top Gun: Maverick remains the only movie in the group with no superhero, no spaceship, and no sinking boat, which is its own kind of flex.

How a sixth weekend goes up

A four-day holiday frame flatters every holdover, so some of that 3.5 percent bump is the calendar. But the holiday only explains the bump if people wanted to see the movie again, and the weekend's new releases gave them very little reason to see anything else. Paramount's By Any Means, the Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II civil rights thriller, opened to $8.5 million over four days. Coyote vs. Acme held well in its second weekend at $15.3 million but is a $60 million movie, not a $360 million one. Nolan's The Odyssey passed $600 million domestic on the same weekend and is now the second biggest film of the year, a fact that would be the headline in any summer without a Spider-Man in it.

The other ingredient is time. Sony has not announced a home release date, and the film is still on more than 3,500 screens. Every week it stays exclusively in theaters is another few million dollars, and the studio has no incentive to pull it one day before the record is official.

The asterisk

Every all-time box office chart is a chart of dollars, not people, and dollars inflate. The Force Awakens sold an estimated 108 million tickets at a 2015 average price of $8.43. Ticket prices have risen a good deal since then, and premium formats like IMAX push the effective price higher still. Run the math with any plausible 2026 average and Brand New Day has sold fewer tickets than the Star Wars film it is passing. It has sold far fewer than Titanic, and it is nowhere near Gone with the Wind, which still sits atop every inflation-adjusted list ever made.

None of that makes the record fake. It just means the record measures something specific: the most money an American release has ever pulled from theaters, in the era of $20 IMAX seats and shrinking theatrical windows. That is a real achievement. It is also a reminder that the more interesting question about a movie is never how big it got.

Biggest is not best, and that is the fun part

The all-time chart is a great argument starter precisely because it is not a quality ranking. Endgame is the emotional payoff of 22 films. No Way Home is a nostalgia machine that works. The Force Awakens is a very good remake of A New Hope. And Brand New Day is a street-level Spider-Man movie with the Punisher and a Hulk in it that somehow outgrossed all of them. Reasonable fans will order those four completely differently.

That is what Shortlist is built for. Pull up every Spider-Man movie ranked and decide whether the new record holder beats Into the Spider-Verse or Spider-Man 2 in a head to head. Then try the harder one: does Brand New Day crack your top five in the full Marvel ranking? And if you want to defend the old champion, the Star Wars tier list is right there. The box office will settle the money question this week. The rest is on you.

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