New Scream Set to Dethrone Spider-Man: No Way Home at Box Office

After four weeks at the top of the box office mountain, Spider-Man: No Way Home is about to fall from the #1 position, dethroned by yet another self-referential franchise movie, the new Scream film. According to studio estimate from Paramount Pictures, Scream locked up $13.4 million on Friday and is on track to bring in just over $30 million over the weekend and potentially north of $36 million for the four-day weekend. Should the film cross that threshold within its first four days it will almost certainly guarantee the revival of the franchise as 2011’s Scream 4 grossed $38 million domestically in its entire run.

Behind Scream though is, naturally, Spider-Man: No Way Home which Sony estimates brought in $5.2 million on Friday with a projected weekend gross of $22 million through Sunday and around $28 million for the four-day-weekend. Should the $22 million projections for the weekend hold it would mark a week-to-week dip of just 32% for the movie which continues to have strong legs leading into the largely uncompetitive month of January (really only Scream will be competing with Spider-Man). Another thing to note is that if No Way Home holds onto its $22 million projection it will push the film over $700 million at the domestic box office, pushing it past Black Panther and becoming the #4 movie of all-time in the US.

2022’s Scream, the fifth film in the franchise, is a co-production between Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group and marks the first entry in the series in over ten years. The film’s opening weekend of $30 million would put it squarely in the middle of the franchise in terms of first weekends, out grossed only by Scream 2 and Scream 3. Produced on a reported budget of $24 million the film’s success over the last entry and in the face of the ongoing COVID-19 Omicron variant seems to be setting the stage for a sixth film in the series.

“This new cast of characters is so wonderful. The legacy cast, they’re so wonderful,” co-director Tyler Gillettrecalled to Total Film previously. “I think what we discovered, and what [screenwriters] Guy [Busick] and James [Vanderbilt] did, is they found a real reason for the next story to exist. We know that there is more gas in the tank. There are more stories to be told in Woodsboro, and about these characters, for sure.”  

Scream is now playing in theaters.