Sony Pictures is flying high after Spider-Man: Brand New Day, starring Tom Holland and Zendaya, swung into the record books with its spectacular opening weekend at the box office.
Director Destin Daniel Cretton‘s film launched to $360 million domestically, leaping past 2019’s Avengers: Endgame for the biggest North American debut ever. Sadie Sink, Jon Bernthal and Mark Ruffalo also star in Brand New Day, which focuses on the title Marvel superhero’s lonely life as he sets out to stop an invisible new foe.
In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Sony Pictures chief Tom Rothman admits that there have yet to be significant talks about Holland returning as Spider-Man for a fifth film: “No, not in any concrete sense — only aspirational.” In light of Holland having told THR at the Brand New Day premiere that he would be open to reprising his role, Rothman says, “I can tell you when I heard that Tom said that, I jumped for joy. All I will say is that hope springs eternal. I really hope so.”
He also quips, “All the geniuses who said that theatrical movies were dead, they’re not necessarily right. Actually, the theatrical marketplace is booming right now, and I’m excited about it. So I’m very optimistic.”
Kevin Hart (left), Karen Gillan, Dwayne Johnson and Jack Black star in Jumanji: Open World.
Hiram Garcia/Sony Pictures
The exec sees the nearly five-year gap since 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home — which marked the previous feature to star Holland as the web-slinger — as having created a sense of scarcity that built excitement for Brand New Day. Rothman also recalls the filmmaking team feeling a sense of uncertainty at first about how to follow No Way Home, which created buzz with the return of past Peter Parkers in Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield before collecting a global total of $1.9 billion.
“[Initially,] the problem for a while was, ‘How do you top that?’” he says. “What do we do next when we just put in all our Spider-Men? The strategic decision was — rather than trying what we all thought would be perhaps an empty effort of going quote, unquote bigger — we just went deeper. That was a very conscious choice to focus on how we could make the audience feel. We were fortunate enough to have a director who was able to balance emotion and spectacle.”
Sony’s upcoming slate for the next few months includes Insidious: Out of the Further, Resident Evil and the Social Network follow-up The Social Reckoning. The studio closes out the year with Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black and Kevin Hart reprising their roles for Jumanji: Open World, hitting theaters on Christmas.
Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney in Sony’s Beatles biopics.
Courtesy of Sony
“It’s hilarious,” Rothman gushes about Jake Kasdan’s movie that will close out the Jumanji trilogy. “It’s the best of the three. It’s very smart because it brings them to the real world, which people want to see, and then it has new twists on the gag.”
In the meantime, Rothman travels this week to the London set of director Sam Mendes‘ forthcoming four-film project about The Beatles that will hit theaters in April 2028. Production continues on the movies that star Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr.
“We’re probably a little more than halfway through shooting, and it’s remarkable,” he says. “It is an unprecedented undertaking. I feel about it what I feel about the Spider-Man movie, which is, everybody knows the broadest outlines of the Beatles story, but [with] Sam and the depth of character, in addition to the most incredible music ever, it’s a really emotional story. So I’m excited about it, but it’s a big undertaking. It’s a year of shooting and then a year of post.”
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