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The suits of Hollywood are used to big numbers. That’s how they roll. But the record-setting opening weekend of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” isn’t something that happens
every day, or every year — more like once a decade. Domestically, the film enjoyed the biggest opening weekend in movie history. And while it had to take No. 2, behind “Avengers: Endgame,” when it came to international grosses, it’s still a staggering fact to consider that “Brand New Day” made nearly $1 billion, the benchmark of triumph for any contemporary blockbuster…in just 72 hours. It now has a chance to become the first movie to hit $1 billion domestically, and the first to reach $3 billion globally. These aren’t just numbers that stun and dazzle, that inspire a studio’s board members to order cases of Krug. These are numbers to get high on, to shoot up on. You may ask: How could the blockbuster mentality be back…if it never went away? Let’s just say that the blockbuster mentality waxes and wanes. The key word in the phrase is not, of course, blockbuster. It’s mentality — a set of thoughts and attitudes and impulses that coalesce into a state-of-mind that supremely prioritizes the making of ginormous-grossing motion pictures. The blockbuster mentality has a rational side. Hollywood is a business, and that business is successful when movies become huge hits. That’s been true since the dawn of the film industry. But the blockbuster mentality also has an irrational side, an irrational exuberance. I would liken it to the experience described by addicts of the first time they get high on crack cocaine. Many have said that that first high is the greatest sensation of their lives, and they have a compulsion to keep chasing it. And that, in its way, is the feeling that was launched 50 years ago by “Jaws” and “Star Wars.” Flash forward, and it’s the feeling the opening weekend of “Brand New Day” can give you. $1 billion in 72 hours. A number like that can become a fix the industry never stops chasing. The Hollywood we know has been built on blockbusters, on sequels and franchises, on IP, on corporate escapist popcorn. And in 2026, a business that looked, for a few years there, like it might be enduring an existential meltdown (COVID, the streaming revolution, the strikes of 2023) appears to have ascended into a triumphant recovery mode. We should all celebrate that. But here’s the danger. The blockbuster mentality as we know it kicked in during the late ’70s, and after 10 years of it, around the time Tim Burton’s “Batman” opened (launching the age of comic-book domination), there was a widespread feeling that movies, creatively, had been squeezed dry. It’s some kind of karmic poetic timing that “Batman” opened on June 23, 1989, and “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” opened less than two months later, on Aug. 18, heralding the rise of the independent-film revolution that would rescue the movie industry, much as the New Hollywood had two decades before. The indie movement meant that the blockbuster mentality would now co-exist with a different mentality. In many ways, we’re at a comparable inflection point. As a business, Hollywood has come back. “The Odyssey” is part of that — but there’s only one Christopher Nolan. The more telling success is that of the insurrectionary one-two indie-horror punch of “Obsession” and “Backrooms.” They point the way to a whole new echelon of artistic energy, coming from outside sources (like YouTube) and from a new generation. But if movies are to have a future, that generation needs to be served, and it can’t be served — and movies can’t thrive — based, simply, on the blockbuster mentality. The jackpot juggernaut of “Brand New Day” has given us amnesia about comic-book-movie fatigue; but you’d better believe it will be back. What’s needed now, more than ever, are studio executives who can serve the imperatives of the blockbuster mentality without getting fatally high on it — without forgetting that their job isn’t simply to make blockbusters.
Sony Pictures, the company that released “Brand New Day,” is headed by Tom Rothman, who understands the blockbuster mentality but is also one of the last of the old-guard Hollywood executives with a track record of backing great movies that are works of popular art (like “Titanic” and “Moulin Rouge!” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”). Will the next generation of studio heads respect and preserve the balance of those two priorities? Let’s hope so. It’s likely that the blockbuster mentality will continue to produce hits. But what it won’t produce are movies that do more than simply entertain us — movies that show us the uncanny depths of who we are. That’s the lifeblood of this art form. Without it, the blockbuster mentality is just a very hungry megaplex snake eating its own tail.
