People really went out to see Spider-Man: No Way Home again at the weekend box office

An abysmal Labor Day box office saw the return of Spidey and Maverick

By Sam Barsanti  |  September 4, 2022 | 8:33pm
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People really went out to see Spider-Man: No Way Home again at the weekend box office
Spider-Man: No Way Home Photo: Sony Pictures

Don’t ever let anyone tell you the American movie theater industry is in trouble, because there’s apparently a lever it can pull whenever things look especially dire and pop out an emergency parachute called Spider-Man: No Way Home. The movie that everyone already saw six months ago, that most people probably saw again on VOD, and that everyone can stream now with a Starz subscription (we’ve all got one of those, right?) is once again the number one movie at the box office—but only by a narrow margin, and only because there are no interesting new movies to see instead. (Before you get pedantic, it’s actually a slightly updated version of No Way Home with a little bit of new footage that, from what we hear, mostly centers on Angourie Rice’s Betty Brant for some reason. It’s the same movie that decided to set the highly anticipated meeting of two different Spider-Mans in the kitchen of Ned’s grandmother, though, so it’s not like things making sense was high on the list of priorities during filming anyway.)

This Saturday was also National Cinema Day, an industry-wide celebration of being worried about box office receipts that saw theater chains all over the country slashing ticket prices to just $3, and while that certainly seems to have helped everybody make some money, it doesn’t seem like it helped anyone make much money. No Way Home came in at the top with only $6 million, followed by Top Gun: Maverick with $5.5 million, DC League Of Super-Pets with $5.45 million, and Bullet Train with $5.4 million.

That may still sound like a lot of money, but last year’s number one movie on Labor Day was Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings, which opened that weekend to $70 million. That’s more—a lot more—than the entire top 10 combined this year. But just think about how much worse things would’ve been without that No Way Home parachute to catch everybody! Slightly!

The full top 10 list from Box Office Mojo is below, and it even includes a re-release of Jaws even though that’s a July 4 movie and not a Labor Day movie. Then again, you could read Murray Hamilton’s mayor character and his initial refusal to close the beaches as a stand-in for the craven, capitalist greed of managers and executives… or maybe the shark is the manager, and him eating the oxygen tank is a metaphor for how bosses eat the workers’ profits and passion and time… and then the “bigger boat” they need is a metaphor for a union? Either way: Celebrate Labor Day by supporting unions. Better yet: Support the Onion Union specifically.

 
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