It turns out that the Scream insurgence was a mere blip. Things returned to normal at the box office this weekend with Spider-Man: No Way Home reclaiming the top after being dethroned last time around. The superhero film, which reunites three generations of Spider-Man stars, finished with $14.1 million, which is slightly higher than Sony’s estimates on Saturday. This is No Way Home’s fifth time topping the charts; it previously held the number one position for four weekends in a row.
Needless to say, it’s made a killing in the last month-and-a-half, having eviscerated all competition (or, whatever little it had of it) along the way. With over $720 million in the bank domestically, No Way Home is the fourth-highest grossing film of all time, behind fellow MCU titles The Avengers ($760 million) and Avengers: Endgame ($858 million), and J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($936 million).
Worldwide, the film has made nearly $1.7 billion, and it boggles the mind to speculate just how much better it would have done in non-pandemic times. Several times in the last couple of years, we’ve seen how restraint has become one of the key virtues that a studio can exercise; on the few occasions that they’ve jumped the gun—*cough Tenet cough*—they’ve suffered.
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Kudos to Paramount, then, for not only showing tremendous restraint in waiting for a theater-only release for A Quiet Place Part II, but also not caving in and debuting the Scream re-imagining on streaming. The film held better than expected (for a horror movie), falling by 59%, for a second weekend haul of $12.4 million. This takes it running domestic total to over $51 million. The drop is in the same vicinity as that of the second A Quiet Place movie, and significantly better than Universal’s Halloween Kills, which, admittedly, also opened higher. More importantly, that film was made available day-and-date on streaming.
With some positive word of mouth, Scream could have an entire week to itself to make what it can; the rest of January looks like it’s going to be rather dull, bringing back memories of when it was generally categorized as the dumping ground month.
Speaking of dark horses, Universal’s Sing 2 made another $5.7 million this weekend, for a running domestic total of $128 million. Both domestically and internationally ($241 million), Sing 2 is the highest-grossing animated film of the pandemic era, having made more than Encanto ($223 million) and The Croods: A New Age ($227 million). Remarkably, it's still playing in over 4,400 theaters, despite being available on digital. Perhaps the film’s performance will make Pixar employees even more livid (despite recent data that suggested the animation house’s Luca was the most-streamed movie of 2021) since it indicates that parents are ready to take their kids to the theaters to watch animated films.
After having seemingly been satisfied by the recent American Underdog, a similar target demographic appeared to give Universal’s faith-based title Redeeming Love a pass this weekend. The D.J. Caruso-directed film managed $3.7 million, which was good enough for a number four finish.
Rounding out the top five was the first outright dud of director Matthew Vaughn’s career, The King’s Man—a spinoff to the popular spy comedy series, whose two previous entries have made a combined total of more than $800 million worldwide. This one, however, has barely scraped past $30 million domestically, with $1.8 million this weekend.
Expect No Way Home to continue its dominant run, at least until Moonfall and Jackass Forever arrive in the first weekend of February.