Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Entertainment

Spider-Man: No Way Home swings to a huge preview night

By

Last weekend, the Thursday through Sunday box office champion, West Side Story, opened with just over $10 million, but now Spider-Man: No Way Home has come to save the day at the box office with one of the biggest Thursday preview nights ever. No Way Home brought in $50 million on Thursday, according to Deadline.

For context, the highest Thursday preview of the pandemic era was Black Widow‘s $13 million. No Way Home not only smashed that mark, but it ranks as the third-highest preview night of all-time. Only Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Avengers: Endgame had bigger Thursday previews with $57 million and $60 million, respectively. When combined with Friday’s estimated $50 million in ticket sales, No Way Home has a real shot of reaching a combined $100 million “opening day.”

Recommended Videos

AMC Theaters is also reporting that No Way Home has set a new mark for the strongest Thursday preview in December in AMC’s storied history. AMC estimates that 1.1 million people saw No Way Home in AMC theaters across the United States. That estimate doesn’t include the number of people who saw the flick at other movie chains. Endgame is the only film that surpassed that mark in April 2019.

How did Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios achieve this feat? It helps to have one of the most popular superheroes in the world. Since Spider-Man’s debut in 1962, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s iconic creation has been Marvel’s flagship character. The first Spider-Man movie set the stage for modern comic book blockbusters in 2002 with a domestic total of $403 million. It remains the highest-grossing Spider-Man movie to date, domestically. However, Spider-Man: Far From Home was the first Spidey film to clear $1 billion worldwide.

Tom Holland in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

It’s also not a coincidence that all of the 2021 Marvel-related movies rank near the top of this year’s box office charts. Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and even Eternals put up impressive numbers. But none of those characters come close to Spider-Man’s popularity among hardcore fans and the general public. There were also certain surprises in No Way Home that drove a lot of the buzz in the weeks and months ahead of its release.

Another major factor in No Way Home‘s huge preview night is that it wasn’t really a night at all. A few weeks ago, No Way Home fans caused Fandango and other advance ticket sites to crash when tickets went on sale. To accommodate the demand, AMC and other theater chains started showing No Way Home in the early afternoon. They also cleared the majority of the other movies out of their theaters for the night, so Spider-Man’s latest adventure could have as many showings as possible. That’s why it became the first movie since Endgame to come close to those heights.

Now that audiences know what to expect from No Way Home, it will be interesting to see how high the weekend numbers play out.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Blair Marnell
Blair Marnell
Blair Marnell has been an entertainment journalist for over 15 years. His bylines have appeared in Wizard Magazine, Geek…
Madame Web: how many post-credits scenes does it have?
Dakota Johnson looks at someone in Madame Web.

If you're coming into the weekend without any idea about who the title character of Madame Web is, then you're not alone. For all of the barbs that The Marvels got – and we've fired a few ourselves – the three characters at the center of that movie at least had the benefit of having two headliners between them. Not one of the main characters in Madame Web has ever held down an ongoing comic book series, least of all Dakota Johnson's Cassandra Web.

But for any comic book movie fans who just have to know about the future of Sony's Spider-Man Universe – aka the movies that don't actually feature Spider-Man – then we can tell you right now how many post-credits scenes that Madame Web has.
How many post-credits scenes does Madame Web have?
None. There's nothing at the mid-credits or the post-credits, so you can run for the exit as soon as the credits roll. Although you may want to leave sooner than that. But consider this post as your clairvoyant vision of the future, which will allow you to stop yourself from losing 116 minutes of your life that you'll never get back. Why should you pay money to see a film that will probably be on Netflix by this summer?

Read more
Madame Web’s ending, explained
Four women stand in a NYC corner in "Madame Web."

Sony and Marvel's latest Spider-Man spinoff, Madame Web, has finally swung into theaters. Set in the year 2003, Madame Web follows paramedic/clairvoyant Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson) as she tries to protect three young women destined to become Spider-Women from being hunted down by the evil Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim). Said Spider-Women include Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie Franklin (Celeste O'Connor), and Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced).

Though it is only the fourth film in Sony's Spider-Man Universe, it has been received just as well as one would expect from the franchise at this point. Before this film even came out, fans knew it would be another misfire on par with Morbius, and things have turned out just as they were foretold. Nevertheless, it's clear that this story is meant to set up something big for the franchise. So now, let's break down what the movie and its ending mean for this cinematic universe.
What is Madame Web about?

Read more
Spider-Man vs. Harry Potter: Which one is the best?
Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man and Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter.

Although the magical Hogwarts adventures of Harry Potter and the super villaininfested New York City of Spider-Man are worlds apart, the two franchises have a common history in this century. The first Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, arrived in theaters in November 2001. Six months later, Spider-Man marked his big-screen debut in May 2002. Both film series went on to be among the highest-grossing franchises ever.

There isn't a true rivalry between Spider-Man and Harry Potter fans in the way that fans would pit comic book heroes against each other. Comic book crossovers actually exist that have put Spider-Man in stories opposite Superman and Batman, the only superheroes who are on his level or beyond. A Spider-Man and Harry Potter crossover is unlikely to ever happen outside the realm of fan fiction, but their similar history makes it an intriguing matchup. So we've decided to compare them in five key categories in order to determine who would be the winner in a Spider-Man versus Harry Potter battle.
Powers and personality

Read more