Box Office: Spider-Man: No Way Home swings into the new year with its third number one finish

Spider-Man: No Way Home brought in the new year the same way it closed it out as the number one choice for moviegoers the last three weeks. While the news has been great for Spidey, Sony, and Marvel, other tentpole releases like The Matrix Resurrections have had to settle for scraps.

Spider-Man: No Way Home grossed $52.7 million over the weekend which represents a relatively slim decline of just 38% from the previous weekend. We knew that the hold would be better over this holiday weekend because No Way Home had to deal with Christmas Eve falling on a Friday last week which affected its box office traction just a bit. No Way Home captured some more milestones this weekend as it’s now the 10th-highest-grossing movie ever at the domestic box office, overtaking Incredibles 2, and now it’s just $8 million away from topping 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi. According to box office numbers firm EnTelligence, an estimated 50 million people have seen No Way Home as of this weekend. To put things into perspective, they estimate that 9 million people have seen Sing 2, 2.9 million people have seen West Side Story, 2.6 million people have seen The Matrix Resurrections, and 1.9 million people have seen The King’s Man. To date, Spider-Man: No Way Home has grossed $609.8 million domestically and, after taking in another $78.3 million overseas from 61 foreign markets, the film has grossed a staggering $1.37 billion worldwide. This figure allowed it to pass Black Panther as the 12th highest-grossing film of all time on the global chart.

Maintaining second place is Sing 2 with a gross of $19.6 million. That’s a slim decline of just 12% from last weekend which shows that families will come out to the movies for the right IP. Sing 2 isn’t performing as well as its predecessor but that was to be expected with what’s going on with the pandemic and the Omicron surge. Considering all that is against the sequel, Sing 2 is actually performing admirably and has been a winner during the holiday season. Sing 2 has grossed $89.6 million domestically and after grossing $17.2 million from 48 overseas markets, the film brings its global haul to $144.5 million.

The rest of the box office gets a bit murky from here and the only good news for the third-place finish of The King’s Man is that it moved up a notch on the chart after its fourth-place finish last weekend. The prequel took in a mere $4.5 million this weekend and declined a relatively slim 24% from the weekend before. The bad news is that this drop isn’t good enough since the opening was so muted in the first place. To date, The King’s Man has grossed $19.5 million domestically and, after grossing $14.1 million from 22 foreign markets, the film has a global take of just $47.8 million.

In fourth place, we don’t find The Matrix Resurrections but we do have the faith-based football film, American Underdog. After finishing in fifth last weekend, the film ticks up a notch on the chart with a gross of $4 million, down 31% from the weekend before. I expected a slightly better hold for the film considering the positive word of mouth from the fanbase but I think the issue here is that the film hasn’t broken out beyond its target audience. American Underdog has grossed $15 million to date and may still prove to be a slim hit considering it didn’t cost that much to make.

Rounding out the top five is The Matrix Resurrections which continues to underperform with a gross of $3.8 million. The film suffered the biggest holiday decline of the top ten with a drop of 64% which could mean that people are choosing to watch the film at home on HBO Max or it’s not living up to fan expectations. I’m going to assume that both factors are at play here and I bet Warner Bros. is thrilled this is the last film on their roster that is going day-and-date streaming and theatrical. This is a model that certainly didn’t work for this film as the reported $200 million project has only grossed $30.9 million to date and it’s pretty much almost out of gas moving forward. Overseas, the film took in $13.7 million from 76 foreign markets over the weekend.

What are YOUR thoughts on this weekend’s box office results?