‘Spider-Man’ Passes $750M Domestic As ‘Lake Changjin 2’ Tops $500M In China

Spider-Man: No Way Home passed $750 million domestic as of a couple of days ago, with a current cume of $752 million as it heads into its ninth weekend in theaters. The legs on this picture, even by the standards of recent Christmas mega-movies (Force Awakens, Aquaman, etc.) have been pretty damn impressive, and only partially because there’s been little in the way of “big” competition. We’ll see if moving Morbius to April 1 was the right move for Morbius, but it seems like it was the right move for Spider-Man 3 version 2.0. It should end the weekend just under Avatar’s unadjusted lifetime domestic  gross ($760 million) and just over/under $1.8 billion worldwide. It should end Sunday night just past Fantasia ($759 million counting multiple rereleases) to rank 24th on the all-timer’s inflation-adjusted club.

If you only count initial domestic theatrical releases (and not various reissues for the early Disney toons or the various Star Wars sequels), then Sony and Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home’s domestic total will rank 16th in terms of inflation-adjusted grosses. It will have already earned 2.92x its $260 million debut, making it leggier than Star Wars: The Last Jedi ($620 million/$220 million) and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker ($515 million/$177 million). Among those which opened so high and dropped so far on weekend two to join the $100 million losers club ($260 million to $84 million, partially due to Christmas Eve falling on a Friday), its 1.61x multiplier from its $470 million ten-day total will rank third behind only The Last Jedi (1.68 x $368 million) and Incredibles 2 (1.75 x $347 million).

It’ll also have earned 95% more in North America than Spider-Man: Far from Home ($390 million in 2019). That’s a bigger jump than any threequel on record save for Goldfinger (+106% from From Russia With Love) and Once Upon A Time in Mexico (+122% from Desperado eight years later and with Johnny Depp in a high-profile supporting role months after Curse of the Black Pearl). Once again, the size of this jump for “just another MCU Spider-Man movie” is remarkable, even when you factor the nostalgia-related elements (the old heroes and villains of prior Spider-Man franchises reprising) and the Christmas release date. Depending on how it holds alongside the second weekend grosses of Marry Me and Death on the Nile, Tom Holland could hold the top two spots (via Spider-Man and Uncharted) next weekend.

Meanwhile, China’s The Battle at Lake Changjin 2 took a brutal drop on its second Friday. The patriotic (and, yes, a little nationalistic if not overtly jingoistic) Korean War epic earned $398 million in its Tues-Sun New Year’s week debut. That was a massive number, even if a $102 million opening day pointed to frontloading. And now the film has earned “just” $497.3 million after an additional five days of business, including a $13.6 million (-78%) Friday. That’s a sharper drop than the 60% fall for Battle at Lake Changjin on its second Friday ($25 million after an initial $64 million Friday) despite opening on a Tuesday and not a Thursday. The first shot-on-IMAX war epic recovered and legged out to $905 million in China alone, so it’s possible that the Wu Jing/Jackson Yee sequel will do likewise.

If the film plays like its predecessor (4.4x the Friday gross), it’ll earn around $60 million for the weekend for a $555 million 13-day total. It could still end up with around $765 million in China by the end, behind only Wolf Warrior II ($854 million in 2017) and Battle at Lake Changjin ($905 million in 2021) among all Chinese releases. We’re talking about a film that may “only” earn on par with the domestic totals of Avatar and Spider-Man: No Way Home in its respective home territory even though its predecessor ended up between the $858 million domestic cume of Avengers: Endgame and the $937 million domestic total of The Force Awakens. However, maybe it’ll fall a little faster and have to settle with grosses closer to Ne Zha ($719 million), Wandering Earth ($690 million) or Detective Chinatown 3 ($685 million).

There is little on Hollywood’s docket for 2022 that has a shot in hell at eclipsing the respective single-territory total that Lake Changjin 2 will amass over the next month. As big as No Way Home was, it still earned less in its biggest territory (around $780 million in North America) than Battle at Lake Changjin did in China alone. Hollywood flicks still have a chance at global dominance. But the single-territory milestones will likely belong to China. It’s not unlike Netflix’s place in the streaming war, with a massive subscriber base that just chooses to watch whatever that week’s big movie or show happens to be, giving them a structural advantage in viewership compared to Disney+, HBO Max or Amazon. At least for the moment, Netflix and China are playing on a different plane from their respective competition.