Home ›› 03 Jan 2022 ›› Show Biz
Disney’s superhero sequel easily ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ easily topped New Year’s Eve box office charts, earning $15.4 million on Friday to send its domestic haul to a mighty $572.6 million. Its performance caps a strong year for its distributor, Sony Pictures, which also scored commercially with the likes of “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” and “Venom: Let There Be Carnage.”
The film’s runaway success is welcome news to the exhibition industry, which is still struggling to come back after Covid upended the theatrical landscape, reports Variety.
Omicron, the highly contagious variant that is leading to record cases of the virus in the US, may prove to be another setback for the business, but so far it hasn’t diminished interest in Spidey’s adventures in the meta-verse. Look for “Spider-Man: No Way Home” to add another $48 million to its bounty this weekend. That should push the film’s stateside gross to over $615 million and enable it to supplant “Incredibles 2” to become the tenth highest-grossing domestic release in history.
Universal and Illumination’s “Sing 2” continued to do reasonably well over the holidays, picking up $6.4 million to push its total to a respectable (for a pandemic) $76.4 million. The family film should generate $19.5 million over the weekend.
But after that the pickings were slim. Lionsgate’s “American Underdog,” a drama about Kurt Warner’s unlikely rise to become a two-time NFL MVP, took third place, earning $1.3 million to push its domestic total to just over $12 million. The inspirational film should earn $4 million over the weekend. Fourth place went to 20th Century Studios’ ‘The King’s Man’.
