All hail the new king!
“Scream” dethroned “Spider-Man: No Way Home” over the four-day Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, becoming the first film to unseat the superhero phenomenon since it debuted on Dec. 17. The slasher revival grossed $34 million from 3,664 locations to top the box office. The impressive haul means that Paramount and Spyglass Media, the companies behind the reboot, will have one very profitable movie on their hands. “Scream” cost a mere $25 million to produce.
“Spider-Man: No Way Home” may have surrendered its box office crown after dominating ticket sales for much of the month of December and into 2022, but it did shatter another record. With $702.9 million in the bank, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” has supplanted “Black Panther” to become the fourth highest-grossing domestic release in history. Only “Avatar” ($760 million), “Avengers: Endgame” ($858 million) and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” ($936 million) rank higher on the all-time list. That’s pretty rarefied company, especially considering that none of those films were released in the midst of a global pandemic. “Spider-Man” continued to draw crowds, earning a projected $25 million over the four-day holiday.
“Scream” has brought back a moribund franchise to life, introducing younger audiences to a series of films that had been left for dead after the box office disappointment of 2011’s “Scream 4.” The key to its appeal was that Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the directing duo behind “Ready or Not,” paid homage to the films that came before “Scream” while updating the series with a savage twist on toxic fandom that resonated with younger crowds.
The filmmakers brought back series veterans Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette and paired them with newcomers such as Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Jack Quaid and Dylan Minnette. And the DNA remained largely the same — once again, a serial killer in a Ghostface mask comes up with grisly and creative ways to dispatch the townspeople of Woodsboro, California, an idyllic community with a great school system and a shockingly low life expectancy.
