Brand New Day’ Heralds End Of ‘Star Wars’ Era

How Star Wars: The Force Awakens Held The Spider-Man Box Office Record For Eleven Years

The Force Awakens opened in December 2015 on the back of decades of pent-up love for a franchise that had been dormant since 2005 and the collective hunger of an entire generation to see Star Wars, well, be Star Wars again. It crossed $100 million in its first day. It reached $936 million over a run of 168 days, overtaking even the then-unbeatable Avatar.

It was not beaten by another Star Wars film. It was not beaten by another Disney film. It was beaten by a Sony film about a Marvel character who was not even part of the main Avengers roster a decade ago.

What Happened To Star Wars While Spider-Man Was Catching Up

The Force Awakens was the beginning of a new Star Wars era. It was also, perhaps in retrospect, the peak of it. The film itself holds a 93% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.

The films that followed, well.

The Last Jedi earned a 91% critics score but a 43% audience score; one of the more divisive entries in the franchise (Russian bot reports notwithstanding).

Solo: A Star Wars Story earned 69% from critics, while The Rise of Skywalker sputtered at 58% from critics and 86% from the audience.

All of the above totalled a franchise that could not decide what it wanted to be, with each instalment partially undoing the choices of the one before it.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day, in comparison, has a 90% critics score and a 97% audience score, a higher congruence of critical and popular approval than the Star Wars sequel trilogy achieved across any of its three films.

The franchise’s cultural dominance, which The Force Awakens’ record had seemed to confirm, eroded alongside its critical consistency. Disney’s streaming strategy of releasing Star Wars content directly to Disney+, did build up a television audience but diluted the theatrical event status that made The Force Awakens feel like a cultural event with no real foundation in the streaming era.

And then there was this year’s Mandalorian And Grogu, a franchise-defining step backwards after a seven-year franchise absence from the big screen. The film opened to just $81.7 million domestically, the softest debut of the Disney era, before dropping roughly 70% in its second weekend and briefly falling behind a pair of low-budget (also record-breaking) independent horror releases.

It closed its run with around $345 million worldwide making it the lowest-grossing live-action Star Wars film to date, below even Solo: A Star Wars Story’s previous low. The film’s Rotten Tomatoes split ran in the opposite direction of the sequel trilogy’s, with critics landing in the low 60s and audiences closer to 86%, but the tepid reviews weren’t enough to offset the box office slide.

It’s not that Marvel has not had its own share of superhero fatigue. In that way, Brand New Day was exactly that for the MCU name, coming after a 2025 where both Captain America: Brave New World, The Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps disappointed expectations at the box office.

Brand New Day crossed $936 million in 47 days, which is less than a third of the time it took The Force Awakens to reach the same total. It set the record for the biggest domestic opening weekend ever at $360 million, surpassing Avengers: Endgame, and is the closest any film has ever come to $1 billion at the domestic box office.