Movie News

“Spider-Man: No Way Home” has generated even more money in its box office debut than initially reported.

Sony’s epic finale in the Tom Holland-led comic book trilogy collected a mind-blowing $260 million in North American theaters over the weekend, above Sunday’s estimates of $253 million. It means “No Way Home” has now surpassed “Avengers: Infinity War” ($257 million) to land the second-biggest debut in Hollywood history behind only “Avengers: Endgame” ($357 million). Not bad for pandemic times.

Internationally, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” captured $340.8 million from 60 overseas markets, pushing its global tally to $600.8 million. It stands as the third-biggest worldwide launch ever after “Avengers: Endgame” ($1.2 billion) and “Avengers: Infinity War” ($640 million).

Naturally, the newest Marvel adventure has obliterated Covid-era box office benchmarks. Prior to this weekend, no movie had been able to cross $100 million in a single weekend. The best attempt had been another Sony’s comic book sequel, “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,

“Spider-Man: No Way Home” is turbocharging the global box office, generating a mighty $587.2 million over the weekend despite rising concerns about the Omicron variant of Covid-19.

The film, starring Tom Holland as Marvel’s friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, isn’t only crushing pandemic box office benchmarks, it’s notching all-time records. With this weekend’s global tally, it ranks as the third-biggest worldwide debut in history behind “Avengers: Endgame” ($1.2 billion) and “Avengers: Infinity War” ($640 million). Notably, the top two films opened in China, which is currently the world’s biggest moviegoing market, while “No Way Home” has yet to secure a release date there.

Domestically, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” netted $253 million over the weekend, the third-best debut ever. Sony and Marvel Studios shelled out $200 million to produce the film and at least $100 million more for global marketing efforts.

“This weekend’s historic ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ results, from all over the

I am fascinated, nay, obsessed, with seeing what ends up on the Netflix top 10 lists each week, because it is truly the wild west of popularity rankings. People are frequently puzzled by what ends up on the top of the charts, because a lot of the time, the movies aren't what we would consider "good" by most critical standards. Just as an example, the "Twilight" franchise scooped up five of the 10 spots one week, proving that Americans were reliving their Twi-hard glory days and marathoning the series. In 2020, "The Secret Life of Pets 2" was on and...

The post These Were Netflix's Most Watched Films Last Week — Which Are Worth Your Time? appeared first on /Film.

Few shows have rebooted their core premise as many times as "Search Party," and in the trailer for the series' final season, the show is reinventing itself again. The Alia Shawkat-led comedy will return on HBO Max on January 7, and it looks like it's ready to go out in a blaze of glory.

"Search Party" has worn several different hats over its run; the show began with a group of hipster New Yorkers, led by self-important Dory (Shawkat), looking for a college classmate who went missing. The second and third seasons dealt with the fallout of a major crime the group commits while...

The post Search Party Season 5 Trailer: Dory's Got A Messiah Complex appeared first on /Film.

Although "Bob's Burgers" has plenty of great episodes to choose from, the yearly holiday installments are always a special treat. The show's Halloween episodes are packed with trick-or-treating and a lighthearted, spooky atmosphere. Its Thanksgiving episodes are filled with trials, tribulations, and turkey. And then, of course, there are the Christmas episodes, which celebrate both the coziness and the chaos of the winter season. 

On "Bob's Burgers," Christmas offers plenty of opportunities for hijinks, from Linda's near-maniacal love for the holiday to the three Belcher kids' (often led by Louise) schemes to score good presents from Santa, no matter what the cost. There are dysfunctional family members to...

The post Every Bob's Burgers Christmas Episode Ranked appeared first on /Film.

There has been much discussion in recent days for various reasons regarding Andrew Garfield and his tenure as Peter Parker in "The Amazing Spider-Man" movies. Without getting into spoiler territory, much of this has to do with the release of "Spider-Man: No Way Home," which has been on a record-shattering tear at the box office. To that point, it seems like now more than ever Sony Pictures will look to double down on the "Spider-Man" franchise, and that might require getting creative.

While nothing has been confirmed by any stretch of the imagination, rumors are circulating that the studio is potentially...

The post Why The Amazing Spider-Man 3 Might Not Be a Bad Box Office Bet appeared first on /Film.

This season, the makeup and hair race is led by “Dune’s” complex prosthetic work on the nightmarish Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), which is up against Jared Leto’s unrecognizable transformation as the disrespected Paolo in “House of Gucci.” The shortlist also includes transformations of Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” Emma Stone as a ’70s punk-inspired version of Disney’s beloved baddie, “Cruella,” and the the return of Eddie Murphy’s Afro-punk look as Prince Akeem in “Coming 2 America.”

“Dune” (Warner Bros.) offers an amazing breadth of work from Denis Villeneuve’s go-to makeup, hair, and prosthetics designer Donald Mowat. But the standout, of course, is the 600-pound, often naked, Baron Harkonnen, inspired by Marlon Brando’s hybrid gorilla look from “Apocalypse Now” and “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” Mowat tapped the Swedish team of prosthetics artists Love Larson and Eva von Bahr

Denis Villeneuve’s sweeping “Dune” leads the way in the VFX race as a cross between “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Star Wars.” But there is plenty of competition from the other shortlisted films, which includes four Marvel movies, “The Matrix Resurrections,” featuring the return of Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and an update on the iconic “Bullet Time”; and “No Time to Die,” which involved an elaborate assault on the beloved Aston Martin DB5 in Matera and the construction of a special rotating gimbal to support a sinking trawler sequence.

Dneg created spectacular VFX for the otherworldly “Dune” (overseen by two-time Oscar-winning production VFX supervisor Paul Lambert and Oscar-winning SFX supervisor Gerd Nefzer). Shot in Budapest, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, and Norway, the work is both epic and intimate, from the wind blown sand, to the raging sandstorms (done practically at the director’s request), to the flying

Another Netflix series bites the dust before its fourth season. The streaming giant's dark comedy "Dead To Me" from CBS Studios has wrapped production for 2021, putting its third and last season on pause. This follows a breakout of the Omicron coronavirus variant in the show's final weeks of shooting. As Deadline reports it, it sounds like the production did the right thing at several levels: an employee came down with symptoms on December 13, was sent home where they tested positive, along with positive test results from a crew member and one of their contacts later in the...

The post Dead To Me Season 3 Has Had To Pause Production Due To Positive Covid Tests appeared first on /Film.

Amazon Prime Video has a new Queen and it's Rosamund Pike! "The Wheel of Time" has just ousted "Hunters" as the most-watched original series on the streamer, according to Variety. Joining Pike (who plays Moiraine Damodred) on the throne are cast members Madeleine Madden as Egwene Al'Vere, Marcus Rutherford as Perrin Aybara, Barney Harris as Mat Cauthon (Dónal Finn will play him in Season 2), Zoë Robins as Nynaeve, and Josha Stradowski as Rand Al'Thor.

It's looking like the show that has been touted as the next "Game of Thrones" is off to a great start. The series reportedly had 1.16 billion viewing...

The post The Wheel of Time Has Bumped Hunters As Amazon Prime's Most-Watched Original Series To Date appeared first on /Film.

This season’s shortlist of 15 animated shorts (mostly in 2D) emphasizes the existential search for hope and healing that’s especially timely during the pandemic. Only two studio shorts are represented this time, though: Disney’s “Us Again,” a fountain of youth CG dancing short (directed by Zach Parrish) about a biracial senior couple who become young again and dance the night away in the rain; and “Robin Robin,” the first stop-motion musical by Aardman (from Netflix and directed by Dan Ojari and Mikey Please ) about awkward bird with an identity crisis adopted by a family of burglar mice.

Meanwhile, here are some of the acclaimed indie contenders (with three from Canada’s prestigious Nfb): “Affairs of the Art” (Nfb), with director Joanna Quinn continuing her acclaimed series of shorts about factory worker Beryl, who’s obsessed with drawing, and how it’s impacted the family’s DNA; the Russian “Boxballet,

While Christmas movies have been part of Hollywood almost since the very inception of cinema, the specific subgenre of holiday rom-coms iis currently more popular than ever. Although each one of these holiday movies has its own special way of bringing its characters together, as a whole they also reinforce the general idea of Christmas magic, using whimsy and yuletide cheer to freshen up a tried-and-true formula. Holiday rom-coms feel like they take place in their own special universe, often set in towns where snow is always on the ground, where the holidays are valued more than anything else, and where the spirit of...

The post The 15 best Christmas rom-coms you can stream right now appeared first on /Film.

Ok so technically this new villain wasn't introduced in "Spider-Man: No Way Home," but in the post-credit scene that accompanies it. Any seasoned Marvel Cinematic Universe movie buff knows to stick around until the very end of the credits, lest they miss out on a bonus scene that may reveal information about the upcoming adventures of our favorite heroes.

With "No Way Home," viewers were treated to both a mid-credit and post-credit scene, with the latter having some pretty strong implications for the future of the MCU, particularly where the upcoming Doctor Strange feature film is concerned.

Unsurprisingly, there are consequences to f***ing...

The post What That New Villain Revealed in Spider-Man: No Way Home Means For the MCU appeared first on /Film.

The shortlists in 10 categories for the upcoming 94th Oscars ceremony have been announced by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and, uh, I have several questions. 

Shortlist voting ended last week, and nomination voting begins on January 27, 2022. The 10 categories announced include Original Song, International Feature, Documentary Feature, Makeup and Hairstyling, Sound, Visual Effects, Original Score, Animated Short Film, Documentary Short Subject, and Live Action Short. The Academy is notorious for leaving out horror cinema from Oscar contention (justice for Toni Collette in "Hereditary"), but this year's snubbing of the Palm d'Or Winner "Titane"...

The post The Oscars Shortlist Contenders Have Been Announced, And Palme d'Or Winner Titane Was Left Out appeared first on /Film.

On the December 21, 2021 episode of /Film Daily, /Film editorial director Peter Sciretta is joined by chief film critic Chris Evangelista and /Film editors Jacob Hall, Hoai-Tran Bui, Brad Oman, and Ben Pearson to narrow down our most anticipated movies of 2022.

All the other stuff you need to know:

You can find more about all the stories we mentioned on today's show at slashfilm.com, and linked inside the show notes.

/Film Daily is published every weekday, bringing you the most exciting news from the world of movies and television as well as deeper dives into the great features from slashfilm.com.

You can subscribe to /Film...

The post Daily Podcast: Our Most Anticipated Movies of 2022 appeared first on /Film.

After four days of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (Sony), December domestic grosses have unexpectedly done only 4 percent less than the same first 20 days in 2019. And to put the huge increase in comparison, before this weekend the total gross stood at less than half. Of course, the good news is a result of the just-under-$300-million total for the latest Marvel sequel. The early result of “No Way Home” alone is 63 percent of the month’s take so far.

All of a sudden, this Christmas looks like it could be closer to normal than anyone expected. Our December preview suggested that a $900 million total — a bit over 75 percent of 2019 — was a high-end target. This included what seemed like an optimistic guess for the first 15 days of “Spider-Man” at $300 million. But after just four days, the film is already hitting that threshold.

That good news arrives just as Omicron concerns are causing

Sometimes "Star Wars" fans can be the worst. Sometimes they're the best people in the world. Sometimes they get really, really lucky. This is one of those times. According to Variety, some hardcore fans got to be extras in the upcoming Disney+ series "Obi-Wan Kenobi," which stars Ewan McGregor. The news comes from "Pen15" star Maya Erskine, who will be in the spinoff series. She told the site's podcast "Just for Variety:"

"The extras were incredible on the set, and a lot of them were mega 'Star Wars' fans ... One guy, he was so nice and he lifted up his sleeves...

The post Star Wars Fans Got To Live Their Dream As Extras In Disney+'s Obi-Wan Kenobi Series appeared first on /Film.

(Superhero Bits is a collection of stories, updates, and videos about anything and everything inspired by the comics of Marvel, DC, and more. For comic book movies, TV shows, merchandise, events, and whatever catches our eye, this is the place to find anything that falls through the cracks.)

In this edition of Superhero Bits:

The "Hawkeye" finale gets a poster

"Spider-Man: No Way Home" writers don't know what's next

Another Marvel Netflix star wants to return to the MCU

The Eternals are about to fight The Avengers

All that and more!

DC has released a new edition...

The post Superhero Bits: Gearing Up for the Hawkeye Finale, Marvel Setting Up Eternals vs. The Avengers & More appeared first on /Film.

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Winter is here. In honor of the first official day of winter, we figured it would be a great time to round up some of the best gifts, collectibles, and other merchandise that “Game of Thrones” fans won’t be able to pass up.

Although the hit fantasy series ended in 2019, fans still love “Got.” You can catch up on old episodes on HBO or HBO Max, which is also where the highly anticipated “House of the Dragon” prequel series will debut in 2022.

If you’re a fan of “Game of Thrones” or you know someone who can’t get enough of Westeros and the Seven Kingdoms, this selection of merchandise runs the gamut in price and genre,

HBO has released a trailer for "The Super Bob Einstein Movie," about the comedian Bob Einstein, who was known for the character Super Dave Osborne and so much more. He starred in his own animated series called "Super Dave: Daredevil for Hire" and a live-action film called "The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave," but the actor and comedian also played the roles of Marty Funkhouser in "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and Larry the Middleman on "Arrested Development." Einstein, who was also the brother of acclaimed actor Albert Brooks, died from cancer in 2019, and now we've got a documentary about him with appearances from...

The post The Super Bob Einstein Movie Trailer: Explore the Legacy of a Comedy Legend appeared first on /Film.