The Biggest ‘Star Wars’ Movie of All Time Is About to Be Dethroned by Jon Bernthal’s New Action Movie

No franchise has shaped the modern blockbuster quite like Star Wars. Nine saga films, years of animation, and now a streaming era later, the galaxy far, far away has grossed more than $10 billion in theaters and influenced just about every franchise that followed, including the MCU: Kevin Feige has admitted over the years that a lot of Marvel’s playbook goes back to Lucasfilm. With all that in mind, this month’s box office story has taken an interesting turn.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day now appears to be closing in on Star Wars: The Force Awakens — the highest-grossing Star Wars movie ever worldwide. For the industry, the Force Awakens became the benchmark every legacy revival has been measured against since. Per Box Office Mojo, that worldwide total now appears to be within reach, with Spider-Man: Brand New Day sitting right behind it at $2,061,701,026 and still adding millions a day in its fourth week. With the gap now under $10 million, the record could plausibly change hands within days.

If that happens, the biggest Star Wars movie would fall to seventh on the all-time worldwide chart, just ahead of Avengers: Infinity War. Per Deadline, Brand New Day reached $800 million domestic in 19 days, four days faster than The Force Awakens did in 2015. If that pace holds, and if current projections prove broadly accurate, a finish somewhere in the $950 million to $1 billion range would put the domestic crown into serious play for the first time in more than a decade.

Some of the credit likely goes to the film’s back-to-basics pitch of a forgotten Peter Parker trying to get by in New York on his own. Jon Bernthal may have helped as well, with his Punisher making the jump from Daredevil: Born Again to the big screen and quickly becoming one of the movie’s biggest talking points. When Bernthal’s casting was announced, The Hollywood Reporter noted that “Curiously, one nonnegotiable he had for his return to Daredevil was maintaining the character’s violent, R-rated feel,” and the PG-13 version has landed well enough that he’s already rumored for Avengers: Secret Wars. Bernthal is also having a notably strong summer either way, since he also plays Menelaus in The Odyssey, meaning he currently appears in both of 2026’s two biggest movies, alongside Tom Holland and Zendaya.

The next few weeks should give a clearer sense of how far this run goes. Worldwide, fifth place belongs to Titanic at $2.26 billion, which still looks ambitious, though perhaps not entirely out of reach depending on how the film continues to hold in markets like China and India. Domestically, the all-time crown now appears more plausible than it did even a week ago, and if that record falls, The Force Awakens would lose the most defining domestic number on its box office résumé. Whatever Star Wars: Starfighter does next year, it may now be facing a very different set of financial expectations.