Superhero movie myth exposed — Iman Vellani points to Spider-Man: Brand New Day
With the Sony and Marvel Studios hit racing past $700 million domestically, Iman Vellani reckons Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s record-breaking run puts paid to a stubborn industry myth.
So, here's one for the numbers folks and the thinkpiece crowd alike—Iman Vellani, the star of Ms. Marvel, has taken a swing at the whole "superhero fatigue" cliché that everyone's been tossing about since Avengers: Endgame. The reason? Spider-Man: Brand New Day has torn up the record books, charging past the $700 million mark at the US box office. Honestly, that's a club with only six other members, so not exactly your everyday feat.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day shot past $700 million domestic, something only six other films have done.
Cynicism vs. Cinema
Vellani's not having any of this doom-mongering about viewers going off superheroes. She popped up on 'The Revenge Of Podcast' to call out what she sees as industry groupthink—that the audience is somehow “over it”—and says the actual turnout tells a different story. People didn’t just shell out for Brand New Day on opening weekend, they turned up in droves. Her argument: the usual suspects claimed the genre was dead on arrival, but given the numbers, that’s nonsense.
Here's how Vellani broke it down on air:
“People showed up [to Spider-Man Brand New Day] in the first week. Like nobody really believed in the superhero fatigue, that means. Nobody really believed that this movie was going to fail, and they were over it. They wanted it to succeed,”
And she didn’t stop there—in her words, modern audiences have become a bit too automatically sceptical about everything new. The reflex now, she says, is to assume that any new film “is going to suck”, or is just some cynical marketing exercise. But actually, good work gets noticed. If you make something decent, people will absolutely go out to see it, superhero costume or not.
A Bit of Context
All this comes off the back of Spider-Man: Brand New Day (with Destin Daniel Cretton behind the camera) smashing past $1 billion worldwide already. Stateside, by Tuesday it had reached roughly $671.2 million, with analysts confidently predicting the $700 million milestone would be crossed imminently (and if you’re reading this now, they were right). That puts it up alongside Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Black Panther as the only MCU titles to ever hit that benchmark in the US—it really is rare air.