It's All About Spider-Man 3
Spider-Man 3 didn't lead the weekend box office. It was the weekend box office.
The superhero sequel grossed $151.1 million, per Sony, establishing a new opening-weekend record and earning more in 72 hours than recent hits such as Click, The Departed and Borat made during their entire runs.
As Spider-Man 3 demonstrated, the road to a $151.1 million weekend gross is a pretty easy one. All you do is start off with $59.8 million on a Friday, a new opening-day record, add another $51.3 million on Saturday, another record (for Saturdays), and top it off with $39.9 million on Sunday, yet another record (for Sundays).
See? Simple. And, according to Box Office Mojo's Brandon Gray, unsurprising.
"It's within the range of expectations," Gray said Sunday of Spider-Man 3's debut. "But it is a sensational one."
According to box-office tracker Media by Numbers, some 22.5 million North Americans saw the film over the weekend, based on an average ticket price of $6.70.
Spider-Man 3 moved past the former weekend record holder, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which set the mark at $135.6 million last July. And it blew past its predecessors, Spider-Man 2 ($88.2 million) and the original Spider-Man ($114.8 million).
So dominant was Spider-Man 3 that, among the weekend's top 12 movies, it accounted for more than 83 percent of all business and helped push the overall box office up 77 percent over the same weekend last year. Add in its overseas ticket sales, and the movie has already grossed $382 million, a new record for a worldwide opening, per Sony.
Why, if Spider-Man 3 keeps this up, it might even break even.
See, not only is Spider-Man 3 very big business, according to a report in Radar, it is the most expensive movie ever, costing Sony $500 million to make and market. (Sony already has another three Spidey sequels on the drawing board and will have to come up with even more cash to retain the key players.)
Box-office records don't come cheap, apparently.
Elsewhere, there wasn't much elsewhere.
Disturbia (second place, $5.8 million; $60 million overall) held up okay after three weeks on top, while The Invisible (fourth place, $3.3 million; $12.5 million overall) and Next (fifth place, $2.9 million; $12 million overall) continued their fast fades.
Director Curtis Hanson's poker-faced Lucky You, starring Eric Bana and Drew Barrymore, achieved honors as the most inaptly titled movie given its release date. Chosen to go toe to webbed foot with Spider-Man 3, Lucky You got stomped on—sixth place, $2.7 million.
On the art-house scene, where Spider-Man's powers were neutralized, Waitress, the diner comedy from the late writer-director Adrienne Shelly, was the resident blockbuster, ringing up $92,034 at four theaters in New York and Los Angeles, Fox Searchlight said. Its per-site average of $23,009 was the weekend's second best.
After Spider-Man 3, of course.
Here's a rundown of the top 10 films based on final Friday-Sunday studio tallies compiled by Exhibitor Relations:
1. Spider-Man 3, $151.1 million
2. Disturbia, $5.8 million
3. Fracture, $3.7 million
4. The Invisible, $3.3 million
5. Next, $2.9 million
6. Lucky You, $2.7 million
7. Meet the Robinsons, $2.6 million
8. Blades of Glory, $2.4 million
9. Hot Fuzz, $2.2 million
10. Are We Done Yet?, $1.7 million
(Originally published May 6, 2007 at 4:23 p.m. PT.)
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