It’s a number befitting of such an epic adventure of multiversal proportions:Spider-Man: No Way Home, the hotly-anticipated latest installment ofTom Holland’s Spidey adventures, has debuted to an awe-inspiring $253 million, from 4,336 theaters across North America. That figures blows any other domestic open during the pandemic out of the water, the erstwhile greatest hit beingVenom: Let There Be Carnage, which scored a comparably measily $90 million (but no one tell Venom we said that).
What’s more, it has fared similarly well overseas, even amid concerns of the growing Omicron wave which has resulted in limited restrictions in some European territories - collecting $334.2 million from 60 global markets. This truly astounding number puts it at the third-biggest worldwide opening weekendever, and again, beats any other Covid-era total by a profound margin.
That the Sony tent pole is achieving such huge figures in the pandemic era is remarkable in itself, but it’s even beating records achieved outside of Covid-times. The last title to see this kind of financial domination wasAvengers: Endgame, which took a hitherto unseen, behemoth box office of $357 million;Spideyhasn’t reached this kind of dough, which one would think to be essentially impossible under current market conditions with Omicron on the rise, but it has pipped the likes ofStar Wars: The Force Awakens($247 million) andJurrasic World($208 million), which is remarkable in itself.
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If your Spidey sense isn’t already tingling - and trust us, it should be - let’s web up some perspective:No Way Home’s total is higher than its predecessors’combined, withSpider-Man: HomecomingandSpider-Man: Far From Homeraking in $117 and $92 million debuts, respectively. Want some more?Spider-Man,Tobey Maguire’s first epoch-shifting outing as the red-and-blue webslinger, established a new domestic opening record in its first weekend with $114.8 million - andNo Way Homehas made almost two-and-a-half times that (not adjusted for inflation).
Suffice to say, such huge numbers cannot be attributed to the rest of the weekend’s titles. The only other debutant,Guillermo del Toro’s similarly anticipatedNightmare Alley, came in fifth with a sub-projection take of $2.95 million. Rounding off the rest of the chart are another Disney property,Encanto($6.52 million) at second;West Side Story($3.41 million) at third; andGhostbusters: Afterlife($3.4 million) at fourth. With spoiler-averse fans keen to beat the internet, Marvel flicks tend to be bookended toward their opening weekends. ButNo Way Homeis one of the few MCU titles to receive a coveted A+ via CinemaScore, indicating huge audience acclaim (this, plus a 9.1 user score on Metacritic at the time of writing) suggesting that word of mouth will be strong.
Assuming Omicron doesn’t throw a spanner in the works, expect a Rhino-esque charge into further box office records over the coming weeks.
