Spidey Swings; Transformers Fizzles - Week 5 and 6

Two more highly anticipated sequels (well, one high and one you probably need to be high for) were released in theaters over the past weekends. Suffice to say, one was very sticky while the other one made you feel stuck. 

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse swung into theaters with a $120.7 million debut. That’s about a (checking notes) $85 million improvement from the first film's start. Holy Moley, that’s what you want from a sequel! People actually excited to go back instead of an “I guess I’m supposed to” attitude… Sounds about how I’m feeling about seeing The Flash tomorrow, but I degrees.

“Across” not only blew past the first “Into the Spider-Verse” debut, it’s already passed the original’s total gross in ten days! A second weekend of $55.5 million (off a 54% drop) left $225 million so far in Miles Morales’ web. I may have needed my son to tell me who Metro Boomin was a couple months ago, but even I can figure out this film’s doing pretty well. 

[minor spoiler about the end… skip to the next paragraph if trying to avoid] I wasn’t aware how much of a “Part 1” this film was going to be when seeing it on opening night. Everything starts building toward a big epic conclusion and you’re like “Let’s do this!” and then a “To Be Concluded” hits the screen. A guy in my theater yelled during the silence of our collective gasps: “You can’t just don’t that!” When you make the “third longest” animated film of all-time and people still wanted more, you did something right. Next March can’t get here soon enough!

While one sequel soared over the city, another got stuck in traffic. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts raised $61 million over its first weekend. While this is lower than most of the Transformers debuts (by a lot), it’s about $15 million more than The Last Knight started with in 2017. Improvement!   

Rise of the Beasts did add Michelle Yeoh, Ron Pearlman, and Pete Davidson to the list of famous Transformers voice actors. Now, why haven’t they ever cast Alexa and Siri as Transformer voices? That makes a lot more sense than having humans record artificial voices. Then again, maybe the characters in the movie would all just start treating them like Alexa and Siri saying things like “Rachet, add milk to the shopping list” and “Arcee, what’s the weather like outside?” Nevermind. 

As for the rest, The Little Mermaid just kept swimming but she’s about to be lapped by a spider. The film has hit $229 million high notes.  

If you saw the ads about how Fast X was already available for home streaming after only three weeks in the theater, you don’t need me to tell you much. While Universal still says there’s TWO MORE films coming in this series (and I’m onboard for all of them, don’t get me wrong), Fast X has slipped into neutral with $138 million.

Meanwhile, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has enjoyed cruise control and even had a bigger weekend than Fast X despite opening two weeks earlier. “I am Groot” means $335 million so far and a $350-360 million total still looks in play.

 

The Top Five If Today Was Labor Day:

#1. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 - $335 million

#2. The Little Mermaid - $229 million

#3. Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse - $225 million

#4. Fast X - $138 million

#5. Transformers: Rise of the Beats - $61 million