Sony and Marvel Studios’ Spider-Man: No Way Home is the smartest, coolest kid in Hollywood.
Not only is the new tentpole shattering records at the weekend box office, it has become only the fourth live-action superhero movie ever to earn an A+ CinemaScore from audiences. The other three are The Avengers (2012), Black Panther (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), all from Marvel Studios.
Three animated superhero pics are also members of the elite A+ club: The Incredibles (2004), Incredibles 2 (2018) — both from Pixar — and Sony’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018).
Overall, Spider-Man: No Way Home is the 91st movie to walk away with an A+ out of thousands of Hollywood studio titles surveyed by CinemaScore through the decades.
The polling and analytics firm was founded in 1979 by Ed Mintz, and is based in Las Vegas. Every Friday, CinemaScore dispatches pollsters to theaters in select cities across the U.S. to gauge demographics and audience interest.
Movies in the A+ club are often box office sensations, such as Titanic (1997) or The Blind Side (2009).
Spider-Man: No Way Home is the latest example. The tentpole grossed a massive $121.5 million on Friday to score the second-biggest opening day of all time at the domestic box office. If projections hold, it will score the No. 3 or No. 4 biggest opening of all time in North America with a weekend haul of $240 million to $250 million.
No Way Home is the first film in the COVID-19 era to zoom past $100 million in its domestic launch and do the sort of business a Hollywood tentpole could count on before the pandemic struck almost two years ago. Until now, the biggest weekend opening of the COVID era was $90 million, for October’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage.
The movie reunites Jon Watts and star Tom Holland, and is from Sony’s Columbia Pictures, which controls the film rights to Spider-Man, and Disney’s Marvel Studios, home to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Spider-Man: No Way Home combines three generations of Spider-Man movies and includes previous villain actors Willem Dafoe (2002’s Spider-Man), Alfred Molina (2004’s Spider-Man 2) and Jamie Foxx (2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2). It also stars Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Marisa Tomei, Jon Favreau and Benedict Wong.