Weekend estimates: Scream breaks $30 million on debut as Spider-Man cruises to $700 million total

January 16, 2022

Scream

Scream will debut with a solid $30.6 million over three days and $35 million over the four-day MLK Holiday weekend, according to Paramount’s Sunday morning projections. That will be easily enough to push Spider-Man: No Way Home into second place in its fifth weekend in release. Spidey will move past Black Panther on Monday to become the fourth-highest-grossing movie at the domestic box office.

Here’s how the numbers look this morning…




Scream’s debut is a return to form for the franchise, and right in line with Scream 3’s $34.7 million opening in 2000 and Scream 2’s $32.9 million in 1997. Much like Spider-Man’s massive opening in December, this hints at a return to normalcy at the box office, if only for the small subset of films that audiences are really excited to see. Given that we’ve only really seen this happen for two movies recently, it’s early days to call it a trend, but it’s something to watch over the next few months. The next movie that will really test that theory is The Batman, which arrives on March 4. The rest of January and the whole of February could be very quiet at the box office.

For Spider-Man, the big remaining question is whether it can pass Avatar and become the third-highest earner of all time at the domestic box office. Its recent week-on-week declines suggest it’ll fall a bit short, with around $730 million in total, compared to Avatar’s final total (partly thanks to a Summer re-release) of $760 million. Spidey won’t have a lot of competition over the next few weeks, but it’ll take more help than that to get it into the top three.

On the international front, No Way Home now has $926.3 million overseas for $1.625 billion worldwide, putting it eighth on the all-time list, and headed for sixth place if it can pick up another $45 million. Given it’ll earn $33 million this weekend, that seems like an easy task. Among other things, it’s the highest-grossing film of all time in Mexico with $72 million.

- Weekend studio estimates
- All-time top-grossing movies in North America
- All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

Bruce Nash,

Filed under: Weekend Estimates, Scream