There’s no denying that the world loves Spider-Man. The Marvel web-slinging superhero has been a sensation in comic books, comic strips, games, TV and movies pretty much everywhere from the very beginning, when Stan Lee and Steve Ditko first introduced the orphaned teenage crime-fighter Peter Parker in their Amazing Fantasy #15 comic book in August, 1962. Spider Man 3 (2007) is the world’s 45th highest-grossing movie ever, with an $890 million worldwide box office total, and four additional Spidey movies rank among the world’s top 100.
But there can be only one country that loves Spider-Man more than all others. You might think that would be the United States of America, where Peter Parker was born. Americans love Spider-Man so much that they’ve placed three of his movies among the top 50 highest-grossing Hollywood films in their domestic box office history.
But that’s mere puppy love compared to the infatuation Indians have shown for the radioactively empowered wall crawler. By several measures, India has demonstrated a far greater passion for Spider-Man than America has.
For starters, Indians can scoff at the box office rankings Spider-Man has earned in the USA. In India, they have showered Spidey’s movies with so much box office love that his films account for three of the top ten highest grossing Hollywood movies in the country’s history, with Spider-Man 3 at number 7, The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) at number 9, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) at number 10. No other movie superhero has even a single solo film in the top 10. It took a whole host of superheroes teaming up in one movie, Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, to out-gross Spidey in India (the 2015 film ranks 6th among Hollywood movies there).
SALUTE INDIA 