Sony’s Spider-Man: No Way Home is doing even bigger business than expected at the Friday box office for a projected weekend debut of $220 million or more, based on matinee returns. If those estimates hold, the superhero pic would secure one of the top four openings of all time at the domestic box office.
No Way Home will be the first film in the COVID-19 era to zoom past $100 million in its domestic launch and do the sort of business a successful tentpole enjoyed before the pandemic struck almost two years ago.
Friday’s expected haul of more $100 million-plus will include a massive $50 million in Thursday previews.
The film scored the third-biggest preview gross of all time, behind Avengers: Endgame ($60 million) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($57 million), a remarkable feat considering the ongoing pandemic and concerns over the omicron variant. To date, omicron doesn’t appear to be impacting the North American box office to any large degree.
The same can’t be said of certain overseas markets and, particularly, some countries in Europe. Yet even internationally, No Way Home is finding its way, grossing north of $100 in its first two days and setting records in many territories.
Other records the new Spider-Man movie has already broken: It scored the second-biggest superhero preview gross behind Avengers: Endgame ($60 million) and is Sony’s biggest preview number ever. In terms of the Spidey franchise, it tripled Spider-Man: Homecoming‘s preview earnings of $15.4 million.
No Way Home, reuniting director Jon Watts and star Tom Holland, is from Sony’s Columbia Pictures, which controls the film rights to Spider-Man, and Disney’s Marvel Studios, home to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The $200 million-plus event pic is receiving an exclusive theatrical release. It began playing Thursday at 3 p.m. local time in more than 3,700 theaters across the country. By Friday, it will be showing in 4,325 cinemas, including all Imax locations. In terms of the Thursday previews, Imax raked in in $10.1 million, its third-highest preview number of all time.
Spider-Man: No Way Home combines three generations of Spider-Man movies and includes previous villain actors Willem Dafoe (2002’s Spider-Man), Alfred Molina (2004’s Spider-Man 2) and Jamie Foxx (2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2). It also stars Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Marisa Tomei, Jon Favreau and Benedict Wong.
On Wednesday morning, significant segments of Spider-Man: No Way Home were leaked online, with Sony working as quickly as possible to snuff them out. Large sections of the highly anticipated film began popping up on YouTube via innocuous Spider-Man searches.
So far, there’s no sign the leaks are hurting the movie at the box office.
Overseas, where No Way Home began launching in select markets midweek, it opened to a huge 7.6 million pounds ($10.1 million) in the U.K. and Ireland on Wednesday, despite omicron. That’s not only a pandemic-era best, beating out James Bond pic No Time to Die, it’s the biggest Wednesday opening number of all time and Sony’s best ever for any day of the week.
If tracking holds, Spider-Man: No Way Home should open in the $300 million to $400 million range globally. The wild card is omicron, which is impacting Europe in particular.
Dec. 17, 1:30 p.m. Updated with revised weekend estimates.