Zendaya and Tom Holland in ‘Spider-Man No Way Home’
Sony and Marvel
The theatrical industry needed a hero to save them, and Spider-Man wasn’t just going to sit there and wait. Source report that Peter Parker held onto the wings of the eagles, and moviegoers watched as he flew away with $121.5 million in domestic earnings. Tom Holland and Zendaya’s MCU sequel earned the second-biggest single-day gross of all time, following the third biggest preview gross ($50 million) ever, behind between Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($119 million, including $56 million in Thursday previews) and Avengers: Endgame ($156 million, including $60 million in Thursday previews). Not only is No Way Home, a multiverse-hopping adventure featuring villains from previous Spider-Man movie franchises and, uh, other surprises, isn’t just playing like an Avenger-level MCU event (think Captain America: Civil War). It’s playing like an actual Avengers sequel.
The raw Friday gross, not counting Thursday previews, is $71.5 million. That’s right between Avengers: Endgame ($97 million sans Thursday) and Avengers: Infinity War ($67 million on Friday alone sans the $39 million Thursday preview gross). As I’ve been saying since A Quiet Place part II opened with $57 million over the Fri-Mon Memorial Day weekend frame (essentially tied with its over/under $60 million pre-Covid tracking in March 2020), the theatrical marketplace has long recovered to where the preordained blockbusters can earn about whatever they would have in normal times. Venom: Let There Be Carnage opened with $90 million. Halloween Kills opened with $49 million. No Time to Die earned $775 million worldwide. And now Spider-Man: No Way Home has already earned $181 million overseas for a $302 million global cume after Friday. But theaters are dead, right?
Presuming opening weekend legs akin to the Star Wars movies which opened here in 2015 ($247 million from a $119 million Friday), 2016 ($155 million/$75 million), 2017 ($220 million/$105 million) and 2019 ($177 million/$90 million), Spider-Man: No Way Home is looking at an opening weekend between $239 million and $255 million. That’ll be right behind Force Awakens, Infinity War and Endgame on the (unadjusted-for-inflation) list of the biggest domestic opening weekends ever. We could see some frontloading due to pent-up interest and/or Covid-specific concerns. Yet even Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II-level frontloading ($169 million/$92 million in 2011, both records at the time) would still get Sony’s $200 million MCU sequel to $223 million for the weekend. You don’t need me to tell you what a big deal this is after almost two years of Covid-afflicted moviegoing.
Spider-Man: No Way Home (which passed Homecoming’s $117 million opening weekend in a single day) is performing as well as it would have had it opened in non-Covid times. Pent-up demand and circumstances of its release suggest a larger opening than it might have netted as just another big summer tentpole had it opened on July 16, 2021 as originally planned. Like Godzilla Vs. Kong, Free Guy and (arguably) Dune, No Way Home was positioned as an even bigger event due to the shifting “theatrical savior” narratives and arguably overperformed compared to pre-Covid expectations. Beyond that, an MCU Spider-Man sequel featuring Tom Holland teaming up with Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange and doing battle against an all-star line-up of his greatest movie foes from the first two Spider-Man franchises (along with… spoilers?) was always going to be a mega-hit.
Jon Watts’ Spider-Man: No Way Home has earned strong reviews (94% fresh and 7.9/10 on Rotten Tomatoes) and excellent word-of-mouth. Subjective complaints notwithstanding, it works as kid-appropriate, IMAX-friendly fantasy spectacle that mostly remembers to A) keep the focus on Tom Holland’s Peter Parker (unlike Batman v Superman) and B) make sure that the twists and reveals mean as much to the characters as to the audience (unlike Rise of Skywalker). Sony deserves credit for knowing exactly what to reveal in the marketing (the returning villains and that you don’t have to watch the Disney+ shows to follow along) and what to hide (everything else), and while the online furry over spoilers is a little absurd (fun fact: the reason the movie works isn’t the “who or what” but the “how” and “why”), that’s not Sony’s fault.
Audiences can and will show up in pre-Covid numbers for a movie which they are deeply anticipating. The MCU is as viable a brand as it’ll need to be, at least with pre-sold marquee characters. That’s not an issue yet as it’ll be straight sequels for Doctor Strange, Thor, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Captain Marvel and the Guardians of the Galaxy over the next two years. This cements Spider-Man’s continuing popularity as a marquee character larger than any other stand-alone superhero. It is slightly depressing in the wake of so many good/acclaimed adult-skewing movies making barely a blip theatrically over the last year, but that’s a pre-Covid problem. It’s also a little grim watching Sony turn previous fumbles (arbitrarily rebooting the Toby Maguire-led trilogy and pretzeling Andrew Garfield’s Amazing Spider-Man series into the next MCU) into a retroactive touchdown.
It is tragic that audiences spend so much more of their annual moviegoing dollar on a smaller portion of event movies while ignoring what the Internet claims (non-franchise, adult-skewing, inclusive and new-to-you movies) they want in theaters. But that’s a pre-Covid problem, one caused by a theatrical emphasis on marquee character-driven tentpoles and Hollywood’s doomed pursuit of their own MCU alongside the rise of streaming as a provider of relatively high-quality non-franchise fare and the affordability of home theaters making multiplexes less “essential.” Even if pre-Covid hits like Knives Out, 1917 and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood suggested hope for non-tentpoles, theaters were never going to survive the pandemic if the likes of Spider-Man: No Way Home couldn’t still pack them in. To quote another franchise threequel, Spider-Man has turned death into a fighting chance to live.
