Spidey 3 Destroys Box-Office Records

by Jordan Yerman | May 6, 2007 at 01:34 pm

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Even though online and on-demand content is getting bigger, $148 million is a massive amount of money. Cinema traditionalists will point to this as proof that the system works, but the making of a film like Spider-Man 3 is, to put it mildly, a tremendous undertaking, and most films do not have such stylistic ambitions. However, the current avenues of distribution do not accomodate for the differences in scale between Spidey and, say, The Ice Storm or Little Miss Sunshine. There will always be room for blockbusters, but they are not the alpha and omega of cinema, nor an accurate representation of the potential of cinema's reach.

Spider-Man caught just about everyone in his web. The superhero's latest adventure, "Spider-Man 3," smashed box-office records with $148 million in its first three days, according to studio estimates Sunday.

That put it ahead of the previous record debut of $135.6 million set last summer by "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest."

With $59.3 million on opening day Friday, Sony's "Spider-Man 3" broke the single-day box-office record, also held by "Dead Man's Chest" with $55.8 million in its first day.

Since it began rolling out overseas on Tuesday, "Spider-Man 3" has taken in $227 million in foreign markets, bringing the film's worldwide total to $375 million. In just days, the movie has grossed $117 million more than its whopping $258 million production budget.

In just two days, it also nearly matched the $114.8 million opening weekend of 2002's "Spider-Man," which had held the debut record until "Dead Man's Chest" opened.