Based on presale tickets, projections, and just general buzz, we all knew that Spider-Man: No Way Home was going to be a big movie. Having said that, in these post-pandemic times, what exactly constitutes a “big movie” isn’t quite the same as it used to be, so just how the film would perform at the box office was an open question. Well, it’s not anymore, and yes, Spider-Man: No Way Home is shaping up to be a monster, putting up one of the best Thursday night preview numbers ever.
Spider-Man: No Way Home did about $50 million in its Thursday night opening, which is the third biggest Thursday night ever, behind only Avengers: Endgame, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. There’s no “pandemic-era” qualifier on these numbers, like there have been for so many in recent months. No Way Home is really the first “business as usual” blockbuster that we’ve seen. It’s expected to do as much as another $100 million today alone according to Deadline.
Even if those numbers are frontloaded and fall off later in the weekend it’s still going to blow away the opening weekend numbers of everything else that’s come out this year. The biggest opening weekend of the year domestically belongs to Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which just barely broke the $90 million mark. Spider-Man: No Way Home was more than half of the way to breaking that before theaters opened for business today.
What makes these numbers so crazy is that, even when compared to the other recent Spider-Man movies, No Way Home is blowing the rest of the trilogy out of the water. Spider-Man: Homecoming, which was previously the record holder for Thursday preview dollars for all of Sony as a studio, did $15.4 million by comparison. No Way Home did nearly four times that amount.
This is the first big screen sequel we’ve seen in the MCU’s Phase Four, and so that might be part of the reason the new Spider-Man did so much better than the other films in the franchise this year. That, and the absolute bonkers buzz surrounding this particular movie. Fans clearly wanted to see if all the rumors would turn out to be true.
Certainly, this shows that pandemic or not, if the right movie comes along, people will still go to the theater, and they’ll do so in numbers like they used to. This makes Spider-Man: No Way Home a big deal for theaters outside of the actual box office, as it means that seeing theatrical distribution return to actual normal is a real possibility.
Spider-Man: No Way Home will be the highest grossing movie of the year. That’s essentially a guarantee unless something wild happens and these box office numbers absolutely crater. That seems unlikely considering that the film isn’t simply something with a lot of hype, but something that actually lives up to it.
