Scream is winning the long Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend at the box office with a projected four-day gross of $34 million, enough to dethrone Spider-Man: No Way Home.
It’s also good enough to revive the classic slasher franchise for Paramount and Spyglass, who partnered on the reboot.
Scream‘s three-day domestic weekend gross is an estimated $30 million, a strong showing considering the ongoing omicron-fueled surge in COVID-19 cases. Final numbers will be released Tuesday; Monday estimates came in slightly lower than Sunday’s projections.
Overseas, Scream grossed $18 million from 50 markets for a global debut of $52 million against a modest $25 million production budget. The U.K. led with $3.4 million.
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The film has younger moviegoers — who have been the most inclined to return to theaters — to thank for its performance. Males led all ticket buyers, though plenty of females turned out as well (53 percent versus 47 percent).
A notable 67 percent of all ticket buyers were between ages 18 and 34. Scream played best in the Western U.S., the South and the Northeast while slightly under-indexing in the Midwest and Southeast. With theaters in Ontario and Quebec closed, Canada came in at a very soft 1.5 percent of the market share on 3 percent of total locations.
Scream opens more than 25 years after the late Wes Craven’s original pic hit the big screen. The new film is the fifth title in the series and a direct sequel to 2011’s Scream 4. It is the first not to be directed by Craven.
Audiences gave the new Scream a B+ CinemaScore, a good grade for a slasher pic. It also drew strong exits.
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett share directing duties. This time, the Scream team sees franchise mainstays Courteney Cox and Neve Campbell, along with Marley Shelton, David Arquette, Skeet Ulrich, Heather Matarazzo and Roger L. Jackson, reprise their roles, while newcomers include Jenna Ortega, Melissa Barrera, Mason Gooding, Dylan Minnette and Jack Quaid.
Scream follows a new Ghost-masked killer who pursues a group of teenagers trying to learn about their town’s past.
Spider-Man: No Way Home fell to No. 2 in its fifth weekend with an estimated four-day haul of $26 million, including $20.8 million for the three days. Sometime on Monday, the blockbuster will become one of only four films ever to cross the $700 million mark at the domestic box office. And it soared past $900 million internationally to finish Sunday with an astounding global haul of $1.62 billion.
Universal took the No. 2 and No. 3 spots on the domestic weekend chart with Illumination’s Sing 2 and female action spy pic The 355.
Sing 2 is projected to gross $11 million for the four-day weekend and $8.3 million for the three days as it croons past the $200 million mark globally for a worldwide tally of more than $216 million through Sunday alone.
The 355 continued to struggle in its second weekend, earning a projected $2.8 million for the four days, including $2.3 million for the three days. The film’s domestic total is just under $10 million.
The King’s Man, from 20th Century and Disney, rounded out the top five with an estimated four-day holiday gross of $3 million for a global tally north of $92 million.
Elsewhere, GK Kids’ Japanese anime offering Belle grossed roughly $2 million from more than 1,300 cinemas.
Jan. 17, 7:30 a.m. Updated with revised weekend projections.
This story was originally published on Jan. 16 at 7:30 a.m.
