Weekend Box Office: Spider-Man's new power is just printing money
Looks like Peter Parker decided to take a break from web-slinging and go swimming in a pool full of money, Scrooge McDuck-style, instead. Either that, or his new superpower is printing currency without a press, because Spider-Man: Far From Home absolutely crushed the box office this weekend. It seems your high-school guidance counselor was right: Taking a trip abroad during your teenage years can be really, really beneficial to you.
Marvel’s first post-Endgame film (admittedly a Sony flick, not that anyone other than an investor cares) opened Tuesday night and earned $91 million before the weekend even hit, thanks to the July 4 holiday, and proceeded to pull in another $93 million for a six-day total of $185 million. That surpasses the expectations of somewhere in the (friendly) neighborhood of $150 million, and while that’s admittedly a bit easier to do when you’ve got the widest domestic opening yet (4,634 screens, good lord), it’s still impressive, and outpacing Homecoming by more than $30 million. Globally, it’s already made more than half a billion dollars, too. It’s safe to assume we’ll be back next week with the same film atop the box office charts.
The rest of the top five is coming in more or less according to expectations, give or take a haunted doll. Toy Story 4 dropped to second place with $34.4 million, giving it a domestic total of $306.6. million—not too shabby for a twenty-year-old franchise. Yesterday managed to remember Beatles songs to the refrain of another $10.75 million, a drop of only 37 percent, bringing it to a $36.8 million total and giving it the number three spot just ahead of Annabelle Comes Home. The Conjuring spinoff picked up $9.75 million in spooky receipts and a cumulative return over $50 million, good numbers for a summertime horror film. Taking the last spot in the top five is Disney’s Aladdin, still hanging the hell on for some reason with $7.6 million more in revenue and a total of more than $320 million. Big blue Willie style is working for Mr. Smith, apparently.
Just outside the top five was A24's latest auteur offering, Ari Aster’s Midsommar. The Hereditary director might still be polarizing with mainstream audiences (the film received a C+ CinemaScore, which is actually a bit better than his previous horror film), but it made almost $11 million during its five-day frame, which actually makes it the biggest indie-film opening of the year. If you haven’t seen it yet, maybe go see it this coming weekend; we promise it’s better than Stuber, though probably not as much breezy summertime fun as the giant-crocodile thriller Crawl is going to be.