Remarkably, Spider-Man didn’t make his debut on the big screen until 2002. But in the decades that have followed, he’s more than made up for lost time, with the franchise as a whole generating close to $10 billion (£7.5bn) at the box office. But which movie was the biggest money-spinner?
Not counting the new Spider-Man: Brand New Day, we’ve ranked all 10 films so far by their individual box office performance, using data from Box Office Mojo that we’ve adjusted for inflation.
Read on to find out which web-slinging adventure proved to be the stickiest of them all with moviegoers.
All dollar amounts in US dollars
Financially, Into the Spider-Verse sits at the bottom of our list, but critically it can make a case for being the most important Spider-Man movie ever made. The film was unconventional by superhero flick standards: an animated film with a visually experimental style and a key protagonist of Miles Morales rather than Peter Parker.
However, audiences embraced it almost immediately, and it pulled in $35 million domestically in its first few days, the biggest December opening weekend ever for an animated movie. Like any good spider, the movie also had legs and went on to spin up a worldwide gross of $375,582,637. It even bagged the Best Animated Feature Oscar, edging out Disney-Pixar for the first time in years.
Across the Spider-Verse came close to doubling its predecessor’s gross, racking up $690,542,303 worldwide. In the five years that separated the two films, word of mouth had spread, amplified by the prestige of an Oscar win, and audience anticipation propelled it to an opening weekend of $120 million in the US and Canada.
The movie pushed the boundaries of animated features, boasting a 140-minute runtime and a different visual style for each of the six universes it traversed. With an estimated production budget of around $150 million, it also became that rare thing: a bona fide blockbuster that turned a tidy profit.
By traditional blockbuster standards, Andrew Garfield’s second outing as Spider-Man was a success. It grossed $708 million worldwide against a (admittedly large) budget of around $250 million and was one of the best-performing movies of 2014. But it’s also considered the most disappointing film of the franchise, largely because of what came before.
As we’ll see, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 fell well below the standards set by its predecessors. Given that Sony pinned its hopes on using it as a springboard to launch an interconnected Spider-verse a la the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the writing was on the wall. What happened next was one of the biggest deals in superhero movie history, as Sony and Marvel Studios negotiated an agreement to bring Spidey into the MCU.
Rebooting Spider-Man barely five years on from Sam Raimi’s final instalment was a bold move that could have gone horribly wrong. Luckily, The Amazing Spider-Man proved to be a reasonably successful reset. It grossed $757 million worldwide, although the bulk of that came from international markets, with domestic performance relatively subdued.
Critics and fans embraced Andrew Garfield, albeit with some reservations about having to sit through another origin story. But compared to that summer’s other superhero offering, Marvel’s all-conquering The Avengers, this particular outing failed to get the Spidey senses tingling.
The first Sony-Marvel Spider-Man collaboration went down a storm with audiences and critics alike, and the reboot of the reboot racked up over $880 million worldwide. Avoiding the origin story anchor that weighed down The Amazing Spider-Man, audiences were thrown into the thick of the action, with Tom Holland’s Spidey having already been introduced to the MCU in Captain America: Civil War.
Homecoming ended 2017 as the highest-grossing superhero movie of the year, leaving the likes of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Thor Ragnarok and Wonder Woman in its wake.
The second part of Sam Raimi’s trilogy starring Tobey Maguire was the lowest-grossing of the three, but the most critically acclaimed of the bunch. The influence of its emotional storytelling and character development can be seen in dozens of superhero films since, and it’s still regularly cited as one of the greatest comic book movies ever made.
That said, a worldwide gross of $786,421,113 was very respectable, particularly given its estimated production budget of $200 million. It became the fastest film to hit the $200 million mark at the time, racing to that feat in just eight days, and finished 2004 as the third highest-grossing flick of the year behind Shrek 2 and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It also bagged the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
On the flip side, 2007’s Spider-Man 3 was the least well-received of the Raimi trilogy, but the highest-grossing (not accounting for inflation) overall. It generated $885 million worldwide and set a domestic opening-day record of $59 million, with $10 million alone coming from midnight showings, making it one of the biggest superhero movies ever released at the time.
However, that lukewarm critical reception helped set the wheels in motion for what came next. Raimi walked away from Spider-Man 4, and the movie was eventually cancelled, leading to the Andrew Garfield reboot just a few years later.
The second standalone Spidey outing for Tom Holland was a box office smash, becoming the first Spider-Man movie to gross over $1 billion globally on its original release. The fact that it was the first MCU movie after Avengers: Endgame helped enormously, with moviegoers eager to see what would play out next.
The movie’s marketing campaign was reportedly one of the most expensive in history but, combined with its hefty production budget, it still made a profit of around $340 million according to Deadline Hollywood. By August of 2019, it had surpassed Skyfall to become Sony’s highest-grossing movie worldwide.
Plans for a live-action Spider-Man movie first surfaced in 1975, but licensing headaches and financial issues ultimately stalled the project until Sam Raimi signed on to direct in 2000. Two years later, Spider-Man debuted to critical and commercial praise, generating $804 million worldwide and becoming the first film ever to hit $100 million domestically in an opening weekend.
In 2002, superhero movies were far less prevalent than today. The combination of Raimi’s visual flair and Tobey Maguire’s down-to-Earth charm helped redefine what a summer blockbuster could be, with that upside-down kiss proving to be a zeitgeist cinematic moment. Arguably, without Spider-Man, the MCU might never have existed.
The ultimate Spider-Man movie? Audiences certainly thought so. This nostalgia-laden superhero spectacle starring not one but three Spider-Men and a host of iconic villains proved irresistible to moviegoers, and it quickly became the must-see film of 2021.
At the time, the global box office was still recovering from the pandemic, and No Way Home’s phenomenal $260 million domestic opening weekend arguably saved some cinemas from total collapse. Its worldwide box office gross of $1,921,426,073 made it Sony’s most successful movie ever, and its juggernaut performance is all the more remarkable given it failed to secure a release in China.
Seemingly the movie everyone needed after the COVID years, it’s the highest-grossing Spidey movie by a long shot and currently ranks eighth on the list of the highest-grossing movies of all time.
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