Ever since he decided it was time to don some red spandex and put on Spider-Man’s suit, the wins just keep coming for Tom Holland. He’s found a wild amount of success ever since he first took on the role in Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017, and that’s been the case ever since, with Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the most recent of the franchise, finding massive success and breaking some seriously impressive records, going on to become one of the top three highest-grossing worldwide releases of all time, behind Avatar and Avengers: Endgame (which it did eventually overtake domestically).
And now it looks like Holland is beating out his fellow Marvel stars for a title that more than a few people saw in his future: he’s officially the highest-grossing actor of all time, passing Zoe Saldaña, who previously held that honor. It’s estimated that he’s now worth $15.5 billion. This comes on the tail of not only his most recent Spider-Man movie, but also his first foray into the Nolan-verse, where he starred as Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, in The Odyssey. The top three highest-grossing actors are currently Tom Holland, Zoe Saldaña, and Scarlett Johansson.
Brand New Day has now grossed over a staggering $2.4 billion worldwide, making it the third-highest-grossing film of all time. It has also surpassed both James Cameron’s Titanic and Avatar: The Way of Water, easily claiming its place among the top films. It performed even better domestically and now sits just behind Star Wars: The Force Awakens in terms of domestic earnings. And it seems the success of the film is rooted in the fact that it brought Spider-Man back to the street-level hero that he got his start as, shrinking the scale while not sacrificing the spectacle that fans have come to expect from a Marvel movie; and it still managed to successfully introduce the world to the X-Men—or, at least, one of them in Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey. Though Holland likely won’t appear in Avengers: Doomsday, that doesn’t mean we won’t see Spider-Man in the action; it will just be Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man in that movie.
Then there’s The Odyssey, which has proven to be another box-office banger, raking in an insane $1.67 billion globally after two months in theaters. Despite sparking serious academic debates about how Nolan chose to handle the source material, the film impressed critics and audiences alike, earning impressive ratings from each: 94% and 96%, respectively. It’s also the first film since Avatar, which released in 2009, to gross more than $1 billion outside the U.S. and Canada without being a sequel or remake. The Odyssey, which is officially Universal Studios’ biggest financial draw, is Nolan’s third $1 billion-plus hit, and comes nearly 2 decades after his first, The Dark Knight, which was also the first superhero movie to break that billion-dollar threshold.
