Someone just popped a champagne bottle at Sony, because Spider-Man: No Way Home just took Avatar’s place as the third-biggest domestic box office in history. The result is even more impressive when we consider that movie theaters are still suffering from the effects of the pandemic and that No Way Home’s box office is three times bigger than the second highest-grossing movie of the pandemic era, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

James Cameron’s Avatar held the top spot of the domestic box office with $760.5 million from 2009 till 2015, when Disney’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens got $936 million and pushed it to second place. Avatar would drop another position in 2019, when Disney’s Avengers: Endgame amassed $858 million. No Way Home is technically a Sony production, but since it’s part of Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, that’s another win to the House of the Mouse.

No Way Home hauled the final $1 million it needed to grab the third position this Monday, taking its domestic box office to $760.5 million. When we look at the global box office, No Way Home is the sixth-highest grossing movie of all time with $1.8 billion. While it’s unlikely the movie will grab another $100 million to surpass Endgame’s domestic record, No Way Home’s impressive box office will undoubtedly ensure both the MCU and Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters to aggressively expand in the near future. The superhero hype train is still on track, and even with the pandemics, it does not seem to be slowing down.

In Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is enlisted to erase Spider-Man’s real identity from public memory. Unfortunately, the spell doesn’t work as planned, and instead brings visitors from other realities into the MCU. Spider-Man: No Way Home features appearances from Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, Jamie Foxx’s Electro, Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, Thomas Haden Church‘s Sandman, and Rhys Ifans‘ Lizard. All these villains come from previous iterations of the Web Crawler, exactly one bad guy for each pre-MCU film — three starring Tobey Maguire as the titular hero, and the other two led by Andrew Garfield.

No Way Home also sees the return of Zendaya as MJ, Jacob Batalon as Ned Leeds, Marisa Tomei as May Parker, Jon Favreau as Happy Hogan, Benedict Wong as Wong, Tony Revolori as Flash Thompson, and Angourie Rice as Betty Brant. Jon Watts returns to direct the third Spidey installment, with a script written by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who both penned the previous two MCU Spider-Man films.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is breaking box office records in theaters right now.

via Collider