Weekend estimates: Spider-Man rewrites pandemic rulebook with $253-million opening
December 19, 2021
After two dismal years for the theatrical business, Spider-Man has returned to change the rules of the game. Again. Back in 2002, the first Spider-Man movie set an all-time record by opening with $114.8 million—becoming the first film to top $100 million at the box office in a single weekend. That was arguably the beginning of the modern era at the box office.
This weekend, Spider-Man: No Way Home may be kicking off the post-pandemic era with a gargantuan $253-million opening. That’s not just the best result of the pandemic. It’s the best by a huge margin, more than doubling the opening of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which itself significantly outperformed expectations. Even more impressively, it’s the third-best weekend of all time, behind only Avengers: Endgame ($357 million) and Avengers: Infinity War ($258 million). In fact, a good Sunday number would take it into second place on that list.
Oh, and it’s already the highest-grossing film of 2021.
Here’s how the weekend looks as of Sunday morning…
Spider-Man really is the only game in town this weekend. It’ll account for more than 90% of spending at the box office, which I believe is an all-time high, beating the 89% market share achieved by Avengers: Endgame over the weekend of April 26, 2019. The only downside to that is that all the other films in theaters are performing worse than expected, which is particularly disappointing for Nightmare Alley and West Side Story, both of which needed strong weekends to have a shot at being major box office forces.
Sony hasn’t shared any demographic information for No Way Home, but it’s a fair bet that it skews a bit younger than the Avengers releases, given the general weakness in the market of older demographics. However, it can’t be that weak in any demographic given how much it’s making in total. The clear message here is that the right film can still deliver a massive punch at the box office. Which raises an important question about the likes of Eternals and Shang-Chi, which looked to be delivering comparatively good business when they opened around $70 million in the past couple of months. Now we know what’s possible, those debuts don’t look so impressive.
So what makes Spider-Man special? That’s a vitally important question for every studio executive right now, and one that no-one can answer with certainty right now. Clearly it stands apart from the other MCU movies in the eyes of the general public. Perhaps it stands apart from any other film in being the one that people who are going to risk one theater visit over the Holidays are going to go see. Almost by definition, a chunk of the audience this weekend are going to movie theaters for the first time since the pandemic started. Some portion of those first-time-returners will get back in the habit of going out to the movies, which has to be good news.
The release of The Matrix Resurrections and Sing 2 on Wednesday will give us some answers. Hopefully Spider-Man will prove to be the start of a new era, and not a flash in the pan.
Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com
-2-News.jpg)
Filed under: Weekend Estimates, Sing 2, Eternals, West Side Story, Venom: Let There be Carnage, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Nightmare Alley, The Matrix Resurrections, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Spider-Man