Original Article By Anthony D’Alessandro At Deadline.com

Sunday Jan 9, 2022: Despite Omicron sending many back to the comfort of their households for January, people are still going to the movies. Specifically, Sony/Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is snatching a fourth weekend of $33M at 4,012 locations, a -41% ease from weekend 3.

Proof that Spidey is immune to Omicron: He’s coming in higher than the $30M everyone was expecting yesterday. His fourth session take here also bests that of previous big Christmas Star Wars titles, including Last Jedi ($23.7M), Rogue One ($22M) and Rise of Skywalker ($15.1M). However, he’s behind Force Awakens’ $42.3M.

Spider-Man took in $8.3M on Friday, and by end of today will raise its cume to $668.7M, which will make it the sixth-highest grossing movie at the domestic box office, ahead of James Cameron’s Titanic ($659.3M). The Tom Holland-Zendaya-Benedict Cumberbatch ensemble is around $10M away from overtaking Avengers: Infinity War ($678.8M) as the fifth-highest grossing movie ever stateside. Box Office firm EntTelligence says that 54.4M tickets have been sold for the Jon Watts-directed MCU sequel to date in US and Canada.

Worldwide, No Way Home stands at $1.53B, the eighth-highest movie around the globe of all-time.

An insider keeps mentioning to me that Spider-Man isn’t the norm. It’s an anomaly at the pandemic box office. I highly disagree with that: It’s an event that plays to all quads and sub-quads, and underscores how you can still draw audiences away from their sofas with the right mass-appealing product, even if we’re freaked out over the variant.

For those movie theaters rolling in dough over popcorn money, Spider-Man is not an anomaly, but a reminder of Christmas pasts. Deep down, no matter if you’re blue or red state, everyone wants to get out and live their lives and manage safety in a Covid-19 environment.

It just boils down to the type of movie you’re going to make extra time for outside your house, and if it looks similar to anything in a Netflix queue, you’re not going to sacrifice time. A period prequel (King’s Man), a flat-flooded franchise sequel available in homes (Matrix Resurrections), and a 2 1/2 hour remake of a 61-year old Best Picture Oscar winner (West Side Story), aren’t pulling in moviegoers like Little Women, Knives Out did two years ago at this time, or Hateful Eight and Big Short did six years ago, when Force Awakens was still ruling January.

Unfortunately, it’s that middling adult fare which continues to swoon, sure to be hurt by Covid. But it is also about product (duh). Spider-Man reps 51% of this weekend’s total estimated $64M ticket sales for all titles. This puts the frame -52% off the same January weekend in 2020, which grossed $132M. The top 10 movies for Jan. 10-12, 2020 made at least $5.1M+; this weekend, the 10th-ranking title’s baseline is at $632K. Also on that weekend, the wide expansion of Universal/Amblin/New Republic’s 1917 led the box office with $37M, while Rise of Skywalker ranked 2nd with $15.1M, and Jumanji: The Next Level in weekend 5 doing $14M in third.

The Simon Kinberg-directed-produced and cowritten all- femme action movie The 355 seemed like a perfect title for Universal, to acquire domestic on at $20M, the movie fitting in its theatrical slate, which is about diversity and representation.

However critics and moviegoers have detected a by-the-numbers action film, and that bad word-of-mouth is deep-sixing The 355, with a $4.8M result in 3rd place. It’s not just omicron, but, yes, word-of-mouth does have something to do with it.  Critics at 26% Rotten are saying to avoid, while CinemaScore is better at B+. But Comscore/Screen Engine’s PostTrak is worse at 76%. According to EntTelligence, The 355‘s weekend B.O. translates to 360k admissions.

RelishMix says about the social media chatter, “Convo for The 355 swings mixed-negative, as fans feel like they’re being served a bit of a cliché cookie-cutter action package in the spirit of Charlie’s Angels or ‘James Bond’s daughters’ with a diverse mix of kick-ass, super-charged women. Fans of Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, and Penelopé Cruz are super-supportively cheering for success. But amidst the Covid-resurge, moviegoers are tapping their finger for Peacock or another streaming service drop date.”

The title was the code name of the first female spy in the American Revolution, and became jargon for a female intelligence agent. As Kinberg told us on Crew Call recently, star Chastain, who worked with him on his X-Men: Dark Phoenix and The Martian production, approached the scribe/filmmaker with the idea of an all-female spy ensemble.

They reached out to Cruz, Nyong’o, Diane Kruger and Bingbing Fan with the pitch to make the movie outside the Hollywood system, so that they could retain fiscal ownership and authorship of the $75M production and share in the pic’s upside in various percentages.

FilmNation sold foreign at Cannes, with CAA Media Finance selling domestic and China, as Deadline first reported in the news about the massive stateside sale. Universal held this title throughout the pandemic. I’m under the impression that tight deals didn’t allow this movie to be sold to a streamer. However, we’ve seen other foreign sales titles become unwound and head to streamers or PVOD on account of the pandemic.

Of course, older adults aren’t storming movie theaters. The results here aren’t that far off from 2020 pre-pandemic spy bomb The Rhythm Section, which opened to $2.7M. Traditionally, we’d rake The 355 over the coals on how it’s poised to be unprofitable. However, with studios practicing streaming, they’re trying to adapt the streamers’ volume sense of accounting to their ledgers, in that they spend so many multimillion dollars on content and hope to offset that cost with subscriptions and other ancillary revenues and global film rentals.

What happens now with The 355? Well, it’s on a 17-day theatrical window and heads to PVOD very soon. In its 45th day of release, The 355, like the rest of Uni’s theatrical slate moving forward, will appear on the pay-tier of Peacock. The 355 will live on Peacock for four months, then head to Amazon Prime, available free to members, for another ten months, before moving back to the NBCUni streamer service. Somehow, some way, Universal will squeeze blood from this rock.

The 355 in updated demos leaned 56% female, 73% over 25 and 40% between 25-44, but also 33% over 45 (still not a lot of money here). Diversity demos came in at 50% Caucasian, 21% Latino and Hispanic, 17% Black, 9% Asian, 3% other. Most of The 355‘s dough came from the West and the South.

RelishMix says that due to 355‘s re-date after a year-long pause, there’s “scattered activity for digital materials,” but a “strong reach by the all-star cast.” The social media universe across YouTube views, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter was close to 120M before opening, with the cast’s social media handles repping 38% of that push, with Nyong’o at 14.5M fans, Chastain at 6.5M, Sebastian Stan with a strong Instagram at 8.4M, Edgar Ramirez at 5.3M, Bingbing Fan at 4.1M.

Speaking of Universal’s short windows and titles appearing on PVOD after 17 days, Illumination’s Sing 2 became available in homes to be rented on Friday. That’s not stopping the Garth Jennings-written and directed animation title from scoring a near $12M third weekend, -41% and hitting $109M. That officially makes Sing 2 the highest-grossing animation movie of the pandemic at the domestic B.O. (since mid-March 2020) and demonstrates that families will go out to animated movies now. (Do you hear that, Disney?).

On Friday Disney announced they were pulling their Pixar movie Turning Red from theaters and sending it to Disney+ on March 11. Actions speak more than words, and that maneuver screams the following: Disney+ is in desperate need of new content to keep their subs growing; the ambitious slate of MCU, Lucasfilm, etc. series they announced back at Disney Investor Day in 2020 seems quite slow to populate the service.

In addition, original animated titles are a challenge to launch at the box office, and it’s conceivable that the studio wanted a healthier marketplace to capitalize on that. The Pixar movie wasn’t booked in the summer, rather the off-season (like Pixar’s Onward before the pandemic) and odds are the audience diagnostics on the movie weren’t good. Otherwise, why send Turning Red into homes? Again, at this moment, with experts predicting omicron to peak this week, no one is expecting the pandemic to get worse by the spring; Warner Bros. currently sticking to its is March 4 release date of The Batman. Says one mid-sized exhibitor to Deadline this morning, “Turning Red would easily do $100 million at the box office. It is not like it’s going to push the needle on subscribers. Send it to Disney +, but give it to me too.”

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