Spider-Man Owns August: $2.33 Billion Says So
Five consecutive weekends at number one, $891 million domestic, $2.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is about to pass Avatar: The Way of Water at the global box office, and at this point the conversation isn't whether it belongs in the all-time conversation — it's where. Five consecutive weekends at number one, $891 million domestic, $2.33 billion worldwide and still climbing. The summer is almost over and it didn't matter. Nothing else got close enough to matter.
What makes this weekend's box office story genuinely interesting isn't the Spider-Man number — that was already written. It's what happened underneath it. Coyote vs. Acme, the Warner Bros. animated film that the studio famously tried to shelve entirely, write off as a tax loss, and quietly disappear from existence, opened in second place with $15.4 million. It beat a Jacob Elordi film directed by Ridley Scott. Read that sentence again slowly. A movie that was declared unreleasable by its own studio just beat a prestige production with two of the most bankable names in the industry. The Ridley Scott film, *The Dog Stars*, managed $8 million. The cartoon that wasn't supposed to exist made nearly double that.
Meanwhile, over on Netflix's biggest competitor for Sunday-night attention, Lanterns episode three arrived and did something the DCU hasn't managed in years — it made people actually feel something. The John Stewart origin story, structured around an OutKast album and the specific mathematics of what a Black man has to prove to hold the same position as his white predecessor, is being called the best hour of television the franchise has ever produced. That's a high bar to set in episode three. It's also the correct assessment.
Elsewhere in the cultural calendar: the Venice Film Festival is underway, and Naomi Watts will be honoured at San Sebastián with the Donostia Award — a piece of news that deserves more space than it's getting, because Watts has spent two decades being one of the most technically precise actors working and receiving roughly forty percent of the recognition she earned. And Francesco Carrozzini arrives in Venice with *Be Brave*, an AI-assisted documentary portrait of Diesel founder Renzo Rosso that is already generating the kind of conversation about technology and authorship that film festivals exist to have.
The devastating verdict: *Coyote vs. Acme* surviving its own studio is the most punk thing to happen at the box office in years. The executives who tried to kill it are now watching it outperform Ridley Scott on opening weekend. There is a God and she has a sense of humour.
