This was a no-brainer, but obviously ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ swung to the top spot in the weekend box office, webbing up $117 million. This is quite good for a franchise that is seven years old and has now been rebooted three times, with three different casts.
According to Anthony D’Alessandro at Deadline:
Completely fresh, and a superhero movie like no other in its John Hughes homage. Sony’s reboot here is reminiscent of what the studio did with Bond in its Daniel Craig-Casino Royale makeover in that it takes the franchise back to its roots. In the books, Bond is a gritty guy, and in the comics, Peter Parker is a wide-eyed teenager.
Of course, it’s hard to beat the Marvel Studios franchise as nearly every one of them does extremely well, even those that are based on the more obscure characters like ‘Doctor Strange‘ and ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’. It was wise of Sony to team up with Marvel in order to set this film in that established universe.
Just a few short years ago, Sony had lofty expectations and planned to build its own shared universe around the ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ films, which starred Andrew Garfield. But when ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2‘ fizzled at the box office, Sony had to temporarily suspend those plans. Even ‘Amazing’ which was planned as a trilogy, was cut short and Sony partnered with Marvel to reinvent the character.
A new, younger Spider-Man, played by Tom Holland, was introduced in the blockbuster ‘Captain America: Civil War’ serving as something of an appetizer in order to warm up audiences to this new take, which goes back to basics.
Playstation released a video called ‘A Film By Peter Parker’ which showed Spidey’s entry into the ‘Civil War’ from his perspective, shot on his cell phone and featuring both Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark and Jon Favreau as Happy Hogan, which you can watch below:
Speaking of ‘Wonder Woman’, that film is STILL hanging in there in the Top Five. Below is the total break down:
- Spider-Man: Homecoming (Sony/Marvel) – $117M
- Despicable Me 3 (Universal) – $34M
- Baby Driver (Sony) – $12.75M
- Wonder Woman (Warner Brothers) – $10.1M
- Transformers: The Last Knight (Paramount) – $6.3M
Opening next weekend is ‘War for the Planet of the Apes’ which also has the exact same impressive Rotten Tomatoes score as ‘Homecoming’, at 93%. Comedy ‘The Big Sick’ expands as well, and it has a phenomenal RT score of 97%. Will that be enough to take down the Web-Slinger?
Check back next week to find out!