Weekend estimates: Spider-Man back to the top with $14.125 million on soft weekend

January 23, 2022

Spider-Man: No Way Home

Spider-Man: No Way Home is back at the top of the box office chart this weekend, with Sony projecting it will earn $14.125 million this time around for a domestic total of $721 million. Scream will be down 59% from its opening (in line with our model’s prediction). Its $12.4 million takes it to $51.3 million so far. Redeeming Love is coming in well ahead of our Friday-morning prediction with $3.71 million over the weekend and will land in fourth place.

Here’s how the numbers look this morning…




No Way Home has earned $23 million over the past seven days, and is now declining around 30% each week. If it can maintain that momentum, it’ll overtake Avatar’s $760.5 million and become the third-highest-grossing film of all time at the domestic box office. Given the lack of competition over the next few weeks, with no wide releases at all next weekend and February’s Moonfall the only film strongly competing for the same demographic until The Batman arrives on March 4, there’s a good chance Spidey will win that race, but it’ll be a close run thing.

Scream should also have a decent run from here onwards. The next horror film on the release schedule is The Devil’s Light, which doesn’t arrive until February 25.

While lack of competition is good news for Spider-Man and Scream, it’s very bad news for the theatrical market as a whole. This weekend will clock up less than $50 million between all movies combined, the worst number since December 10, when West Side Story opened with just $10.6 million. Next weekend’s market total will inevitably be worse, possibly taking the total box office below $40 million for the first time since May 21 last year.

This weekend’s two new wide releases shouldn’t be blamed for this softness, because they both met or exceeded (modest) expectations. Redeeming Love’s $3.71 million is more than double our model’s prediction, and another sign that faith-based films might be drawing decent audiences again. The King’s Daughter’s $750,000 debut is right in line with our model’s prediction, although to be honest this was a hard film to predict given its lavish production and troubled history. Given its target audience, and negative reviews, it’s a film that could have sunk without a trace. It might well do that next weekend.

One small piece of good news is that Sing 2 has overtaken Encanto to become the highest-grossing animated film of the pandemic era. Encanto stands at $222.87 million so far, enough to make the 102nd-highest-grossing digitally-animated film of all time. Sing 2’s $241.2 million puts it in 99th place on the list. All of which points to how tough that market has become over the past couple of years, and goes some way to explaining why Disney sees premieres on Disney+ for Pixar movies as being in its business interests right now.

- Weekend studio estimates
- All-time top-grossing movies in North America
- All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

Bruce Nash,

Filed under: Weekend Estimates, The King’s Daughter, Encanto, Sing 2, West Side Story, Scream, Redeeming Love, Spider-Man: No Way Home