VCG/Visual China Group/Getty ImagesGoing into its second week in movie theaters, the newest MCU offering, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, has already broken box office records. It has already made $1.052 billion globally, making it the second-fastest movie ever to hit that record, right behind 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. So, clearly, Marvel isn’t really on the ropes, and there’s no superhero fatigue at all. In fact, regardless of which continuity of Spidey we’re talking about, every single Spider-Man movie since the 2002 film has been a box office success, even the poorly reviewed ones (2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2) or ones people love to forget didn’t happen at all (2007’s Spider-Man 3). Yes, both of those movies, with Rotten Tomatoes scores of 50 and 62, respectively, made $700 million and $890 million at the box office, respectively. These are low points for the franchise, and both are higher than the 2025 Superman, which took home about $600 million worldwide.So whether a critical dud, or a crowdpleaser, or just a so-so entry, Spidey prints money. But why? Why, among all the comic-book superhero adaptations, has Spidey proved bulletproof at the box office, even if whatever reigning Spidey movie of the moment is, perhaps, not the best Spidey movie of all time?Spider-Man’s popularity is clearly connected to profit, but quality isn’t that important Right now, Brand New Day ranks seventh among all the Spidey movies on Rotten Tomatoes, but that’s still with a 90 percent critical score. To put this in perspective, the seventh place slot among Batman movies on Rotten Tomatoes is Batman Returns with an 81 percent ranking. And to put that further in perspective, Batman Returns made $266 million worldwide. You get it. Spidey’s seventh most-loved movie (based on RT scores alone) is still at least twice as profitable (when adjusted for inflation) as the same-ranked Batman movie.Does all of this prove that Spidey is the most popular superhero of all time? Only someone out of touch with reality would say anything other than yes to that question. Clearly, over the decades, Spidey has crossed generational divides and become the one superhero with whom nearly every kind of audience member can find something in common. Tom Rothman, the Sony Pictures Chairman, told Deadline that Spider-Man makes money because: “Whether you live in Peru, Pakistan, or Peoria, everyone wants friends and wants connection with everyone. Fundamentally, this is a movie about friendship and hope.”Right, but Thunderbolts* was also about friendship and hope (and arguably told a newer, more dynamic story than Brand New Day), but it was basically a box office failure for Marvel Studios. So, in order for superhero blockbusters to hit the billions, the general audience has to care, and it’s unlikely the reason a regular moviegoer chooses to shell out money for a Spidey movie has anything to do with hoping for a movie about friendship and hope. Instead, Spidey represents, most likely, in the minds of various kinds of audience members, a reliable return-on-emotional-investment.And that’s because, on some level, every single (live-action) Spider-Man movie is the same.Brand New Day is exactly like every other Spider-Man movie, which is why it’s already made a billion dollars Jeff Spicer/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty ImagesCan you believe the last Tom Holland-led Spidey movie was released five years ago in 2021? Well, depending on your age, that either feels very recent or very distant. Either way, Brand New Day’s brilliance — which arguably existed in the marketing of the film — is that the movie doesn’t care if you remember all the stuff that’s happened in the previous movies or in the rest of the MCU because half of the characters literally don’t remember either. Doctor Strange clearing everyone’s memory of who Peter Parker is, but allowing them to remember who Spider-Man is, allows the movie to do what every single Spider-Man movie does best: Follow the Spidey pattern. What is that pattern? Easy:Spider-Man is doing great fighting crime, but he’s paying a personal price.Spider-Man loses his powers at some point and/or his powers get out of control. Spider-Man misses MJ and/or Gwen Stacy. He longs to have a normal life, which includes love.Spider-Man talks to himself a lot/finds unlikely allies along the way.Spider-Man overcomes all, because the greatest enemy is his own self-doubt.Of note, nearly everything about the Spidey pattern is that it's focused on character stuff, rather than external object stuff. Longtime Spider-Man comics writer J. Michael Straczynski pointed out in his Substack recently that Brand New Day isn’t as burdened by a comic book Maguffin as other superhero movies, saying: “...the very real likelihood that what some call ‘comic book movie fatigue,’ is actually MacGuffin fatigue...”This is a pretty good point, because it also gestures to why Spider-Man movies seem to do well at the box office no matter what: The gimmick is the character, and that character, for more than one generation of moviegoers, is one people like to follow. The superpowers help, but it’s Stan Lee’s basic pitch for Spider-Man in 1962 that sells it: The character was a teenager with personal problems. This was the basic innovation. Not the powers. Not the villains. Not the rogues gallery. But the internal problems. Spider-Man is almost always a coming-of-age story, and even in Brand New Day, it’s sort of like, Spider-Man graduates college and has to deal with people drifting apart. All of this is ten times more relatable than anything Clark Kent is up to, even if it’s objectively less original. And thanks to the solid foundation of Tobey Maguire’s Spidey, the idea that Peter Parker is just a regular guy who happens to be Spider-Man is something the audience has internalized and also has come to expect from the character. If No Way Home proved anything in 2021, it’s that those three actors: Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland, were all perfectly cast, and each made an art out of wearing his heart on his spider-sleeve.Even in his earliest appearances in the 1960s, Spider-Man was a runaway hit, an underdog that everyone loved. | ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty ImagesGenerally speaking, other superheroes have internal problems, too. But for a variety of very easy-to-understand reasons, moviegoers tend to believe in Spidey’s problems more than the problems of other heroes. The great power Spider-Man has at the box office is to make money no matter what. But, arguably, the reason that’s been the case is that every day moviegoers think that he’s pretty responsible with that power. Early in Brand New Day, police chief Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas) gives Spidey a second chance after he flies into a spider-hormone-induced rage fit. She perfectly represents the audience for the past 24 years: We’ll always give Spidey another chance, even if he lets us down a little. And that’s because a Spidey failure, paradoxically, still feels like victory.Spider-Man: Brand New Day is in theaters now.