In 2017, when “Spider-Man: Homecoming” opened at $117 million domestically, I went “Meh.” This weekend, when I found out that “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is opening at an estimated $120 million, I'm all: WOW!

A pandemic will change you like that.

Alright so it's not just the pandemic. “Homecoming” was the opening salvo of the third iteration of live-action Spider-Man movies, and live-action Spider-Man movies used to break box-office records: 1 and 3 (first iteration) were the biggest openers ever up to that point. Hell, the first was the first to cross the $100 million barrier. It was an event. So when the third iteration opened as merely the 29th biggest opener ever, it was a bit of a shrug.

“Spider-Verse,” meanwhile is a cartoon, and so seems, I don't know, less adult. The first one in 2018 only opened at $35 million—a fraction of what live-action Spideys brought in. But it was diverse and critically acclaimed and gained adherents once it began streaming. Plus it was the first superhero movie (right?) to bring universes together, which is the great plotline of 2020s superhero cinema—not to mention Oscar-winning movies—so I guess that's why we got this. “Across the Spider-Verse” is the lucky 13th film to open north of $100 million since the pandemic began. It's also the second-biggest opening of the year—after another cartoon, “Super Mario Bros.,” in April—and the third biggest opening ever for a Spidey movie.

Here's a chart of those openings. Keep in mind that three of them (“Spider-Man 2,” “The Amazing Spider-Man,” and “Far from Home”) didn't open on a Friday but on the Tuesday or Wednesday before July 4, so their “weekend” numbers are skewed. The first RNK column is where the movie's opening ranked at the time of its release; the second is where it ranks now:

Either way, that's a lot of web-slinging. Probably too much. What stories aren't being told because we don't want to hear them?