Zendaya and Tom Holland in ‘Spider-Man No Way Home’
Sony and Marvel
Sony and Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home earned another $31.4 million on Tuesday in North America, dropping 16% from its $37 million Monday gross and bringing its five-day cume to $328.7 million. It’s still a larger five-day total than Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($325 million) but the Star Wars sequel earned $37 million on Tuesday dropping just 6% from Monday. Now, for the record, that film’s record-holding $937 million domestic gross is not the bar for success, far from it. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see if the acclaimed and well-received No Way Home (which opened with a 5% bigger opening weekend sans inflation) still starts to fall behind Force Awakens as early as today.
Barring a sharp decline, it’ll be past $400 million on Friday and presumably past $500 million by the end of the weekend. Legs in the range of Disney’s four Christmas Star Wars flicks will give Spider-Man: No Way Home a ten-day total between $460 million and $544 million domestic, so at worst it’s already past Avengers: Age of Ultron ($458 million) by Sunday night. Could Covid concerns and/or actual competition from Sing 2 and Matrix 4 put a dent in Spider-Man 3 version 2.0’s holiday sprint? I suppose, but that’ll just mean it’ll need a few more days to top $500 million domestic and $1 billion worldwide. With numbers this big this quickly, this is mostly about which milestones it’ll demolish.
It’ll soon pass F9’s $555 million overseas gross and No Time to Die’s $613 million foreign box office cume to become the biggest overseas Hollywood grosser since Frozen II (Rise of Skywalker earned “just” $559 million overseas). Still halfway plausible is a domestic total above the $904 million Chinese gross of The Battle At Lake Changjin, which would give Spidey the year’s biggest single-market gross and the second-biggest single-market gross behind The Force Awakens’ $937 million domestic cume in 2015/2016. However, no one will mourn for a final domestic cume closer to Avengers: Infinity War ($677 million) than Avengers: Endgame ($867 million), although getting past Hi Mom’s $837 million Chinese gross would be a moderate morale victory.
The Tom Holland/Zendaya flick earned $38.6 million overseas yesterday, for a $75 million global gross, giving Sony’s $200 million release $422.6 million overseas and $751.3 million worldwide. It has zoomed past F9’s $721 million global gross and will today top No Time to Die ($774 million) to become Hollywood’s biggest global grosser since Jumanji: The Next Level ($800 million), Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker ($1.073 billion), Joker ($1.073 billion) and Frozen II ($1.45 billion) in October-December 2019. It should be past $800 million global early tomorrow and could be at around $950 million by Christmas Eve as it soars past $1 billion on Christmas Day right as Venom: Let There Be Carnage is passing $500 million.
Once it tops the $1.073 billion gross of Joker, it’ll be the biggest-grossing movie without a penny from China. Yes, No Way Home may play there eventually, as may Venom: Let There Be Carnage take a shot at replicating Venom’s $269 million Chinese gross. Venom 2’s $498 million cume is pretty damn close to Venom’s sans-China $585 million gross from 2018. I’ve frankly been saying for years that China mostly served to artificially boost the global grosses of already successful films, providing a huge upside in a market where Hollywood only gets back 25% of the ticket price. At this point, Spider-Man 3 version 2.0 may only “need” China if it wants to join the $1.5 billion or (haha?) $2 billion-plus club.
