Spider-Man’s odyssey

There’s a new #1, or is there?

Exclusive to MeierMovies, September 17, 2026

With Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey stealing cinematic headlines recently, it’s the box-office odyssey of another film that is actually the bigger story. In case you haven’t heard – and most haven’t, as the news seems relegated to the equivalent of a newspaper’s inside pages – Spider-Man: Brand New Day has become the highest-grossing film ever in North America, with roughly $937,000,000 as of September 16.

Spidey passes Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), which, remarkably, held the record for 11 years despite the enormous growth in ticket prices over the last decade. That’s right, we’re talking straight money, not adjusted-for-inflation prices. And that’s perhaps why the news has been played down: because it ultimately means little. Indeed, no film this century has cracked the real North American top 10:

Gone with the Wind (1939): $1,895,000,000
Star Wars IV: A New Hope (1977): $1,669,000,000
The Sound of Music (1965): $1,335,000,000
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982): $1,329,000,000
Titanic (1997): $1,270,000,000
The Ten Commandments (1956): $1,227,000,000
Jaws (1975): $1,201,000,000
Doctor Zhivago (1965): $1,163,000,000
The Exorcist (1973): $1,036,000,000
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937): $1,021,000,000

Adjusted stats are from BoxOfficeMojo.com. Go here for the straight-money domestic records. (Numbers include re-releases.)

Internationally, the numbers are different for both straight and adjusted-for-inflation stats. Spider-Man: Brand New Day now sits at #3 all time in straight money at roughly $2,500,000,000 but is unlikely to move up, as the top two films, Avatar (2009) and Avengers: Endgame (2019) still have a considerable lead. Adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind (1939) is tops with more than $4,500,000,000 while Avatar (2009) sits at #2 with roughly $4,150,000,000, according to Wikipedia. (Films from the 21st century have had better luck on the international adjusted list than on the domestic adjusted list because of the exponential growth of the market outside North America.)

I’ve said it before: When will the film industry stop judging success by money and judge instead by tickets sold, similar to the recording industry? It’s the only true barometer of long-term success. Answer: probably never, as studios love to brag about films being the “biggest” and “greatest,” when in fact they are simply the “newest and “latest,” which doesn’t sound as sexy. And the lazy media is complicit in this deception, routinely reporting the straight-money numbers with no reference to the adjusted stats. Their lack of integrity has my spidey senses tingling.