Spider-Man: Brand New Day has used its web to recapture a once-faithful audience.
The new Marvel Cinematic Universe sees Tom Holland reprising his title role on the big screen for the first time since 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is currently the eighth highest-grossing movie of all time thanks to a worldwide gross of $1.921 billion. 2026’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which also features crossover appearances by Mark Ruffalo as Hulk and Jon Bernthal as Punisher, has big shoes to fill when it makes its domestic debut on July 31, but its projected global debut of more than $450 million shows that it already has great promise.
It is continuing to cement its status as a potential hit thanks to a brand-new record that it has already set after opening in China on Wednesday. Per The Hollywood Reporter, as of 1:53 a.m. ET, the movie had already earned $16.5 million in the territory and was on track to earn an opening day of $37.4 million. This will be the best opening day for an American superhero movie in China since 2019, when Spider-Man: Far from Home debuted with $36 million.
In fact, this will still be the case even if it doesn’t quite hit its projections by the end of the day. The $16.5 million that it had already earned by midday far surpassed the previous post-2019 record-holder, which was 2024’s Venom: The Last Dance ($9.4 million). While long-range projections aren’t necessarily reliable, the Chinese ticketing company Maoyan expects the movie to land around $255 million in China by the end of its run, which would be the best for any American movie in China since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame ($632.1 million).
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is thus officially ending a box office curse that has been plaguing superhero movies in China. Chinese regulators severely limited the number of American superhero titles – particularly Marvel Cinematic Universe movies – that ran in the territory between 2019 and 2023 (No Way Home didn’t play in the region at all). However, even though more recent titles from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania on have played in China, they have severely underperformed since 2023.
Although China provided a significant boost to some of Marvel’s biggest hits, including Avengers: Endgame (which is the second highest-grossing movie in history, with a worldwide haul of $2.799 billion), the region has recently been responding better to homegrown hits like 2025’s animated sequel Ne Zha 2 (which is now the fourth highest-grossing movie ever, and the first to earn more than $1 billion in a single territory).
It remains to be seen if the success of Marvel’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day will be followed by a resurgence of American superhero cinema in China. Spider-Man in particular has an ability to connect with Chinese audiences that many other superheroes don’t. Regardless, the fact that this installment will be getting the China boost could make it the highest-grossing MCU movie in years, ending a streak of recent box office disappointments and outright flops that includes The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts*, and The Marvels.
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- Release Date
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July 31, 2026
- Runtime
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145 Minutes
- Producers
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Amy Pascal, Kevin Feige, Rachel O’Connor, Avi Arad