Spider-Man: Brand New Day has broken US box office records, posting the biggest opening day and biggest opening weekend in history with a $360 million domestic haul, surpassing Avengers: Endgame. IGN writer Alex Zalben argues this success, alongside the recent Avengers: Doomsday, confirms that Marvel Studios' future increasingly rests on just two franchises, with the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe struggling to draw comparable audiences.

The piece notes that since 2019, only Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine have crossed the billion-dollar worldwide mark that studios treat as a benchmark, while other releases have underperformed, including The Fantastic Four: First Steps at $522 million and The Marvels at just $206 million globally. Zalben suggests Disney and Marvel are likely to lean further into Spider-Man and Avengers films as their reliable hits, even as other properties, bar exceptions like an upcoming X-Men reboot, fail to replicate the studio's earlier monoculture success.