Paramount’s Scream re-imagining claimed the top spot in its debut weekend at the box office, dethroning Sony’s Spider-Man: No Way Home from pole position after four weekends. The horror sequel scared up $35 million in its extended four-day MLK weekend debut, registering a much-needed win for Paramount.
The struggling studio resisted the temptation to debut the film on streaming (or even day-and-date on Paramount+), which showed tremendous confidence in what directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett had turned in. The Radio Silence duo took over the franchise from original director Wes Craven, who passed away in 2015.
The new Scream had a three-day opening in the same range as a couple of the franchise’s previous entries—Scream 2 opened to $32.9 million back in 1997; Scream 3 made $34.7 in 2000; Scream 4, however, couldn’t crack $20 million in 2011.
Horror sequels have performed reliably well during the pandemic. Paramount deployed a similar strategy for John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place Part II, holding out for a theatrical release even as it offloaded other titles to streamers. The risk paid off, and the film made $47.5 million in its opening weekend last year. Universal’s Halloween Kills, although front-loaded, performed slightly better, with a $49.4 million opening just a few months ago.
Overall, the MLK weekend was expectedly soft; 2020, for instance, delivered the record-setting Bad Boys for Life. It was one of the last major films to release before theaters were shut down for the first time because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since then, the domestic box office has experienced several false stars, with only a handful of bona fide hits. The biggest by a wide margin is Spider-Man: No Way Home, which finished at the number two spot with an estimated four-day haul of $26 million. More importantly, the film crossed the $700 million mark domestically, which puts it at the number four spot on the all-time list, behind only Avatar, Avengers: Endgame and Star: Wars: The Force Awakens. By now, it is clear that the superhero extravaganza, which reunited three generations of Spider-Man actors, performed about as well as it would have in non-pandemic times.
Universal’s Sing 2 hummed along for a third place finish, with an estimated $11 million haul across four days. The animated sequel’s running total is just over $122 million, which isn’t a patch on the original film’s performance, but is the best pandemic-era result for an animated feature. Sing 2 is the first animated film since 2019’s Frozen II to cross the $100 million mark at the domestic box office. All this is even more impressive when you factor in the film’s availability on digital.
Things aren’t going as swimmingly for 20th Century Studios’ pricey prequel The King’s Man. In one of the most glaring examples of the audience simply not caring for a property anymore, the film is expected to close the extended weekend with just $3 million, as it crawls past the $30 million mark domestically. Compared to the first two films’ $128 million and $100 million domestic hauls, 20th Century might want to rethink its plans for the follow-up.
Rounding out the top five was another spy dud, director Simon Kinberg’s female-led The 355, which is expected to make $2.8 million over four days, for a running domestic total of an abysmal $8.9 million in two weeks. For those keeping score at home, that’s 0 for two for Kinberg, who also directed the franchise-killing X-Men film, Dark Phoenix. Fingers crossed that studios don't take away any wrong learnings from this one; namely, that all-female ensemble pictures don't work.
Like No Way Home, which faced barely any competition in the weeks following its mid-December release, the path is clear for Scream to scoop up what it can in the next couple of weeks, before the release of Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall and Jackass Forever in February.