As Thanos would no doubt concur, Spider-Man: No Way Home defying COVID pandemic uncertainties to become a $1 billion hit was always inevitable, and it is now official as Tom Holland’s latest adventure as Peter Parker has become the first movie to achieve the feat since The Rise of Skywalker back in December 2019. Despite being delayed a number of times, the passion for Spider-Man clearly didn’t suffer for it, as the film snatched the second highest opening weekend ever from under the nose of Avengers: Infinity War with a $600 million box office haul.

From the moment the first trailer dropped, there was no doubt that Spider-Man: No Way Home was going to have to suffer some kind of calamity to not be a monster hit, and it seems that while many other movies, including some of Marvel’s own releases, have struggled to reignite cinemas as many had hoped, Spider-Man has become a real-life hero to singlehandedly bring more people back to theaters in a fortnight than pretty much all of the movies outside the year’s top 20 movies have managed combined.

To put the achievement into some further context, there were nine films released in 2019 that breached the $1 billion mark, including Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home, but the highest achieving Hollywood movie of 2020 was Bad Boys for Life, which took $426 million and previously this year Daniel Craig’s final James Bond outing No Time To Die held the top spot with $774 million. Even taking into account the huge Asian release of The Battle at Lake Changlin which was previously the highest grossing movie of the year with $902 million, Spider-Man has managed to completely blow away any competition that could have stood in its way.

As well as dominating the annual chart, Spider-Man: No Way Home isn’t about to stop there. In 2019, Spider-Man: Far From Home managed to piggyback the success of Avengers: Endgame to take $1.13 billion across its run and become not only the biggest Spider-Man movie ever, but also Sony’s highest grossing picture in their history. Now it is almost certain that both of those records are about to come Spider-Man: No Way Home’s direction with the film still having at least a month to go in its exclusive cinema window before it moves to streaming.

With the MCU already slowly drawing threads from their Multiverse story in their last few movies and TV series on Disney+, Spider-Man: No Way Home finally saw those threads being pulled a little more to bring in Spider-Man villains and heroes from previous universes and create one of the most ambitious MCU movies seen so far. Many movies that build up their hype to the level seen for this Spider-Man offering turn out to disappoint many fans when it doesn’t live up to expectations, but even in this department Tom Holland’s web-slinger has managed to avoid the pitfalls to secure positive reviews from both audiences and critics. For all of those who believed that Avengers: Endgame was going to see the MCU struggle to match the epic culmination of the first eleven years of the Marvel saga, it seems that there is plenty of surprises still to come as we head into a whole new multiverse adventure with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in May 2022.