The last film of the Marvel cinema universe Spider-Man: No Way Home, which the French public was able to discover on Wednesday, is released in North American theaters on Friday. Experts estimate it could rake in more than $ 150 million in revenue in its first weekend. Even if the American cinemas have recovered a little this year, the superhero would sign there by far the biggest success for a film since the release of the last episode of Star wars in December 2019.
This was before the coronavirus and no film has surpassed the 100 million mark for its release since then. “All year long in the sector, it’s been one step forward and two steps back, summarizes Paul Dergarabedian, analyst of the specialized company Comscore. Spider-Man’s performance will really 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, is the first film in the history of cinema
to have exceeded $ 100 million in revenue for its first weekend of operation. 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 (movie) series to have
been that far. This is the ninth episode“Spider-Man adventure,
David Gross, at the head of the specialized firm Franchise Entertainment Research.
“It’s incredibly popular. And we’re gonna have a huge weekend“, he predicts.
How did it feel to share the screen with iconic Spider-Man villains? @ TomHolland1996 details the experience on the #SpiderManNoWayHome red carpet! pic.twitter.com/F8pcfuy3Zh
– Marvel Entertainment (@Marvel) December 15, 2021
Even if 2021 is set to garner twice as many 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 is Sony, the big-eared firm’s rival, who owns the film rights to Spiderman, 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 the success of Spiderman 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 so that everything suddenly improves and goes back to how it was before“, says David Gross.
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Released two days in advance with us, this new opus had a record start with at 1 p.m. Wednesday already 310,000 tickets sold, pre-sales included, close to the figure reached by Star wars 9 in December 2019 (392,483 spectators at 1 p.m. on the day of its release).