BOX OFFICE: “Spider-Man” approaches All Time Record, “Odyssey” Clears a $Billion, “By Any Means” cracks Top Five

Labor Day Weekend is both a four-day weekend, and the “last weekend of summer” as far as the movies go.

So all the $numbers piled up and reported here will be for the four days of the first moviegoing weekend of September.

“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” devoured the summer of ’26, and adding another $21 million (per Deadline.com) which puts it within reach of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” as the all time “domestic” (North America) box office champ.

“Force Awakens” earned $936 million pre-Trumpflation bucks back in 2015, in North America alone. “Brand New Day” will be over the $920 million mark by midnight Monday.

But the movie’s box office take is slacking off enough to notice. It’s losing some weekdays to “The Odyssey,” which just cleared the $1 billion mark, only that’s the worldwide take of Christopher Nolan’s greatest hit. It’s closing in on $1.6 million, domestic and worldwide.

“Coyote vs. Acme,” the movie Warner Bros. didn’t want to release, will add another $13 million over this four day holiday. That gives Ketchup Entertainment a prayer of earning back its $50 million purchase of the WB’s much more expensive than that cast-off. It’s over $35 and may clear $50 before September is done, making any post-theatrical sale to streaming something close to pure profit.

Smart, Ketchup. Very smart.

Fourth place is a dead heat between Disney/Pixar’s “Cars” re-release — a twenty year old film whose first fans are taking their children to see it — and the new Paramount mob muscles Mississippi bigots thriller, “By Any Means,” with both films on track to clear $8 million.

“Cars” struck me at the time as the first misstep Pixar made, a franchise launched by a studio that manufactured good reviews by cherry picking who got the “first look” at it. They built a whole, soulless franchise out of that, with “Planes” and increasingly crappy toy-sales-oriented pictures.

But rediscovering the found-money in re-releasing old titles could discourage Disney’s out-of-ideas/let’s remake-everything ethos (“Moana” was a warning shot). So “Cars” selling nearly a million tickets isn’t a bad thing.

“By Any Means” proves Mark Wahlberg still has an audience, even if it’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II‘s movie, as far as leading man goes. It’s earning mixed to negative reviews across the board.

“Insidious: Out of the Further” keeps cashing in, with another $7 million (four day) weekend, good enough for sixth place.

I was going to stick around for A24’s “Onslaught” after catching “By Any Means.” But end of summer sci-fi — genetic soldiers, Dan Stevens and what not — is rarely anything worth sitting in a theater with. Weak reviews and a $2.7 million take won’t have anybody popping champagne corks at the distributor’s closed-for-the-holiday-weekend offices.

It’ll be battling for seventh place with “Fall 2: Deadpoint,” another dangling from very-high-places thriller from the makers of “Fall.”

That leaves “End of Oak Street,” “Mutiny,” “Buddy,” and “The Dog Stars” battling for the final two spots in the final box office weekend of the summer. Figure “Dog Stars” and “Mutiny” have the inside track on staying in the top ten, as “Tony,” “Spa Weekend” and “Paw Patrol” don’t have anything left in the tank.

Check back later in the weekend as I’ll update this when more data comes in, despite the fact that we’re all supposed to be off baking in the climate-changed heat.

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About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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