Spider-Man Broke the Record. The Odyssey Is Aging Better.

Spider-Man and the Punisher (Jon Bernthal) in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, now the 10th highest-grossing film of all time. Credit: Sony Pictures Releasing.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day held onto the number one spot for a second straight weekend, pulling in $144.2 million domestically. That's still a massive number. It's also a 60% drop from opening weekend, which pushes the film's domestic total to $654.3 million and its worldwide gross to $1.67 billion. That officially makes Brand New Day the tenth all-time earning film at the box office, full stop, not just for the year.

Here's the number worth sitting with, though. The Odyssey dropped only 38% in its equivalent second-post-opening weekend, pulling $31.7 million for a $461.3 million domestic total and $1.11 billion worldwide.

A 60% second-weekend drop isn't unusual for a superhero tentpole. That's how these films are built to perform: enormous opening, front-loaded on hype and fandom urgency, steep falloff once the built-in audience has already shown up. A 38% drop is a different animal. That's the retention curve of a film people are recommending to each other, not just a film people pre-committed to seeing on day one. Odyssey isn't just performing well. It's performing like something with legs, in a summer dominated by a record-setting superhero movie.

That matters for a reason beyond box office trivia. The industry conversation for the last few years has assumed audiences will only reliably show up in force for franchise IP: established characters, built-in fandoms, decades of brand recognition doing the marketing for you. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is proof that assumption still holds at the top of the market. But The Odyssey's retention numbers are a quieter, more interesting data point: an original, auteur-driven, three-hour epic with no franchise scaffolding is holding an audience better, week over week, than the biggest opening in box office history. Word of mouth is still a real force. It just doesn't show up in the splashy opening-weekend number everyone tweets about. It shows up two and three weekends later, in exactly the numbers most casual box office coverage skips past.

Elsewhere in the top five: One Night Only opened in third with $5.5 million, a soft debut for the Will Gluck rom-com. Toy Story 5 continued its steady march past $1 billion worldwide, dropping to fourth with $4.2 million domestic. Super Troopers 3 premiered in fifth with $4 million, a reminder that legacy comedy sequels can still find a theatrical audience even without a blockbuster marketing push behind them.

Next weekend, Brand New Day is projected to hold number one for a third consecutive week. Whether The Odyssey's slower decay curve turns into a genuine long-tail earner, or whether Brand New Day's sheer scale simply outlasts it regardless, is the more interesting story going into fall.