Yesterday I wrote about Spider-Man: Brand New Day beating Avengers: Endgame's domestic opening day record, and now the numbers are official. Peter Parker didn't just break the record. He demolished it.

The reported tally is $168 million on opening day, the biggest domestic opening day in the history of movies. Not the biggest for a superhero movie, not the biggest for a summer release. The biggest, period. Endgame's previous record sat at $157.4 million since 2019, and most of us figured that number would stand for a long time.

It didn't even last seven years.

What's wild is that this was never supposed to be a sure thing. You can check the reporting from MSN, but the short version is that expectations were massive and somehow still exceeded. The hype was real, the marketing was everywhere, and audiences showed up in numbers that make you rethink what's possible at the box office in 2026.

I've been saying this for a while now. Streaming will never replace the unique energy and communal feeling of watching a blockbuster in a packed theater. People voted with their feet yesterday. They wanted to be in the room when this thing dropped, wanted to hear the crowd react, wanted to feel that buzz in the lobby afterward. You don't get that on your couch, no matter how nice your TV is.

Now the real question shifts to the weekend total. Can Brand New Day also claim the all-time domestic opening weekend record? That race is still playing out, and I'll be watching the numbers come in like everybody else. The kind of box office story Jess Wingo would remind me I called "inevitable" three months ago when the first trailer dropped. She's not wrong. I did say that.

But calling something inevitable and then watching it actually happen are two different feelings. This is the latter, and it's a blast.