Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter“Spider-Man: No Way Home” has officially unseated director James Cameron’s 2009 science-fiction epic “Avatar” to become the third-highest grossing domestic release in history.After weeks of speculation over whether or not Peter Parker had the legs to bump the people of Pandora from bronze, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” collected the remaining $1 million on Monday to push “Avatar” — and its mighty $760.5 million at the North American box office — to fourth place in the record books.Sony’s latest Spidey adventure, a culmination to Tom Holland’s web-slinging trilogy, has grossed a stunning $760.9 million at the domestic box office since launching exclusively in theaters in December.
Those ticket sales are three times as much as the next highest-grossing movie of the pandemic era, which is Disney and Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” with $224 million.
For “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” the buck may stop here. It would require an additional $100 million in domestic ticket sales to catch “Avengers: Endgame” ($858 million) at the No.
2 spot and even more to match “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” ($936 million) in first place. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but even that kind of comeback would be unlikely in the middle of a pandemic.“Though ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ benefits from a much higher average ticket price than ‘Avatar,’ this does not detract from the enormity of this achievement coming during a pandemic-impacted marketplace,” says Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst with Comscore.
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