A new king has ascended the throne in Ithaca—and the summer movie season as well. Tom Holland, who stars in The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, is having a major moment this summer. The Odyssey is already a critical and commercial smash, raking in more than $650 million globally after just two weekends, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day is set to make a killing when it hits theaters on Friday, July 31. If prognostications are correct, The Odyssey is on track to earn anywhere from $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion at the box office, while Spider-Man: Brand New Day—the long-awaited follow-up to 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, which grossed a massive $1.9 billion—is tracking to make $180 million to $190 million in its opening weekend, which would make it the biggest domestic opening of the year. If everything goes according to plan, Holland could very well be the actor at the center of a $2 billion-plus summer box office haul.
Of course, Holland isn’t the only actor who appears in both of these massive films: His wife, Zendaya, also appears in The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, sitting at the top of the box office throne with her husband. (Talk about a power couple.) But Zendaya’s roles in The Odyssey, where she has a grand total of about five minutes of screen time, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, where she plays Peter Parker’s love interest, MJ, are smaller than those of her husband, who plays the titular role in Spider-Man and has one of the meatier major supporting parts in the star-studded Odyssey, portraying Telemachus, the son of Matt Damon’s Odysseus and Anne Hathaway’s Penelope. With Dune: Part Three on the horizon for December, Zendaya is primed to be the undisputed box office champion of 2026. (Fun fact: Benny Safdie, Holland and Zendaya’s Odyssey costar, is currently the highest-grossing film actor of 2026, thanks to that film and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Not bad for the director of The Smashing Machine!)
But make no mistake, as far as male movie stars go, Holland is the king of this summer. It may feel a bit odd that the baby-faced Holland has joined the ranks of major action-movie stars like Tom Cruise, Will Smith, and Chris Pratt. But at 30 years old, Holland is three years older than a 27-year-old Smith was when Independence Day debuted in 1996 and a jaw-dropping seven (seven!) years older than Cruise was when he dominated the box office with Top Gun at 23 years old in 1986. Despite—or, rather, because of—his boyish charm, Holland has reached the peak of male movie stardom. But after Spider-Man: Brand New Day, it’s time, we think, for Holland to hang up the superhero tights and begin the journey to taking on more adult roles.
