(Los Angeles) With great power comes great responsibility: Hollywood and the film industry therefore have great hopes for Spider-Man and the new episode of his adventures to revive a box office left bloodless by the COVID-19 pandemic .
The last film of the saga, Spider-Man: No Way Home, released Friday in North American theaters and specialists estimate that it could garner more than $ 150 million in revenue during its first weekend.
Even if the American cinemas have recovered a little this year, the superhero would sign there by far the greatest success for a film since the release of the last episode of Star Wars in December 2019. It was before the coronavirus and no film does not exist. has since passed the 100 million mark for its release.
“All year, in the sector, it has been one step forward and two steps back,” summarizes Paul Dergarabedian, analyst for the specialist company Comscore. “Spider-Man’s performance is really going to matter. “
Spider-Man: No Way Home is the third film in which the hugely popular Spider-Man is played by British actor Tom Holland. Previously, the red and blue suit, worn by Tobey Maguire and then Andrew Garfield, was already breaking the bank at the box office.
the Spiderman original, in 2002, was the first film in cinema history to exceed $ 100 million in revenue for its first weekend of exploitation.
Monday, on the red carpet of Los Angeles, Tom Holland praised the merits of the last opus, between “nostalgia” and “celebration of the cinema” according to him.
The story picks up where it left off Far From Home in 2019, with a Spider-Man whose real identity, Peter Parker, is publicly revealed by the villainous Mysterio.
The high school student is desperately trying to return to anonymity with the help of another Marvel character, Doctor Strange, played by the no less popular Benedict Cumberbatch.
“Batman, Superman and the X-Men are the only other series (of films) to have gone this far. This is the ninth episode ”of the adventures of Spider-Man, notes David Gross, at the head of the specialized firm Franchise Entertainment Research.
“It’s incredibly popular. And we’re going to have a huge weekend, ”he predicts.
Flops and misfires
PHOTO MATT KENNEDY, SUPPLIED BY SONY PICTURES
Tom Holland, Jacob Batalon and Zendaya in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Even if 2021 is set to garner twice as much revenue as last year, with its share of room closures and confinements, there were still more failures than successes.
Films aimed at older viewers, such as the remake of West Side Story by Steven Spielberg released last weekend, often flopped.
Even the Marvel superheroes, whose latest films blithely exceeded $ 1 billion in admissions, have stalled. The Eternals, which will not remain in the annals of the critics, thus collected only $ 70 million for their first weekend in theaters, a poor performance for this subsidiary of Disney.
Unlike most Marvel heroes, it’s Sony, the big-eared firm’s rival, who owns the film rights to Spider-Man, which is why his films are absent from the Disney + streaming platform.
Sony is the last major traditional Hollywood studio not to have its own video-on-demand platform, and Spider-Man’s success will only appear more spectacular.
Even if No Way Home arouses great enthusiasm, the film industry still has a lot to do to recover, especially with the rise of the Omicron variant, notes David Gross.
And if the film is to hope to exceed $ 1 billion in global revenue, it will have to perform well in the Chinese market, where it does not yet have a release date.
“I don’t want to play the ominous birds […], but I don’t think everything suddenly gets better and goes back to how it was before, ”says David Gross.