No Way Home’ Tops Friday With $1.75 Million

In a bitterly ironic end to a profoundly undernourished summer movie season, Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick may fail to top the box office in its 15th weekend of domestic release thanks to Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home. Brad Pitt’s Bullet Train may win out in the end. That it’s even a question or that there isn’t some new biggie being offered up this weekend is a statement. Sure, Labor Day isn’t a hot holiday weekend, but Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings opened with $94 million last year. The ‘disappointing’ $9.4 million Fri-Sun opening of Chris Nolan’s Tenet, part of a long $20 million opening week in the summer of 2020, now again looks aspirational. Simply put, there’s no excuse for this circumstance.

It’s not unheard of for an earlier summer sensation like Top Gun 2 to return to the top of the box office late in the season. Forrest Gump topped on its ninth weekend on Labor Day 1994 on its way to $329 million domestic. In this case, it’s entirely due to the lack of high-profile theatrical products. For all the reasons we’ve discussed since February when The Batman was left to hold up the entire month of March all by itself, there haven’t been many new biggies since April of this year. That we’re talking about a 25% drop from summer 2019 instead of a 50% drop, with 50% fewer films in theaters, is entirely due to Tom Cruise’s legacy sequel topping $700 million domestic instead of grossing $150-$200 million.

How bad is it? Last Labor Day weekend, the oldest movie in the top five was Jungle Cruise in its sixth weekend. In 2019, the top ten featured The Lion King in weekend seven, Hobbs & Shaw in weekend five and three others (Angel Has Fallen, Good Boys and Ready or Not) in their second or third weekends. This year? The top movie for the weekend may be the one in its 15th weekend or a 38-week-old rerelease, Spider-Man: No Way Home. Universal also sent Jaws back to theaters in IMAX and/or 3-D auditoriums, which again marks an ironic way to end a summer that was supposed to mark a theatrical comeback. Once again, the problem is a summer where you had six tentpoles and maybe seven programmers all season.

Sony’s Spider-Man: No Way Home – The More Fun Stuff Edition earned $1.74 million to top the domestic Friday box office. It’s technically the top-performing opener of the weekend. Of course, it’s the same movie (with 11 extra minutes) that demolished box office records in late 2021 and early 2022 (partially because, broken record alert, it was the only game in town). It should earn around $4.9 million for the weekend and $6 million for the holiday haul, bringing its lifetime domestic total up to $810 million. The Steven Spielberg-directed shark tale earned $870,000 on Friday for a likely $2.04 million Fri-Mon gross, bringing its unadjusted lifetime domestic total to $262 million ($1.2 billion adjusted for inflation). And, to quote Forrest Gump, that’s all I have to say about that.

Anyway, the only new release this weekend was Focus Features’ Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul, which debuted in theaters and on Peacock concurrently. Adamma Ebo’s modestly budgeted mocumentary, starring Sterling K. Brown as a disgraced megachurch pastor trying to make a comeback and Regina Hall as his long-suffering wife, is closer to a dark dramedy than a Christopher Guest-style comedy. That’s probably part of why it pulled a C- Cinemascore grade. Regardless, it was never going to break out theatrically, hence (in this case) the Peacock arrangement, so its $430,000 Friday, setting the stage for a $1.27 million Fri-Sun and $1.53 million Fri-Mon weekend isn’t much of a surprise. Maybe those decrying a lack of big screen comedies in theaters should try seeing one in a theater.