Thoughts on Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, ten years after its surprising and record-setting $100m+ debut.

Ten years ago, we had our first $100 million opening weekend.   Ten years ago, feeding off twenty years of anticipation, positive reviews, and a post-9/11 atmosphere that craved distinctly American heroism, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man pulled off the unthinkable.  And really, looking back on that fabled three-day weekend in May 2002, that's the thing that sticks out.  In these days of heavily-publicized box office tracking reports, with every blogger with a website playing box office pundit, with studios having mastered the art of saturation-level opening weekends down to a science, Spider-Man's record Fri-Sun debut was a complete surprise.  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had just broken the three-day record six months ago with $92 million.  Spider-Man wasn't even supposed to be the biggest movie of summer 2002, with that honor theoretically going to Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones.  Spider-Man was supposed to be the warm-up play, the summer kick-off picture that wetted the appetite for the big guns coming down the pike.  It was The Mummy, the Deep Impact, or the Twister of the summer movie season.  But as I discussed four years ago, sometimes the summer kick-off films surprise you.  Even so, with buzz building and free press galore coming from mainstream entertainment sources, pundits like myself were optimistically predicting an $80 million debut, followed by a somewhat quick plunge once Attack of the Clones brought the thunder 1.5 weeks later.  But as we all know, something very different happened.

Spider-Man opened with $39 million on its first Friday, a single day record that lasted one day until its $43 million Saturday gross.  By Sunday the film had wracked up $114 million, besting 'the boy who lived' by $22 million and becoming the first film in history to reach the century-mark over its opening weekend.  But it didn't stop there.  Terrific word of mouth and a lack of competition led to a record non-opening weekend of $72 million over its next Fri-Sun frame.  How big was that number? At the time, it would have been the fourth-biggest weekend of all-time.  Its third weekend, even up against the $80 million Fri-Sun debut of Attack of the Clones (the fourth-biggest opening weekend in history, now chalked up as disappointing thanks to Spider-Man's record run), the web-slinger pulled in another $46 million over its third weekend.  It pulled in another $35 million over the four-day Memorial Day holiday weekend, sending it to $333 million and racing towards $350 million in record time.  To give you some idea of the strength of its weekend-to-weekend run, it's second weekend still ranks fourth among all second weekends, only Avatar has ever had a stronger third weekend, and only Avatar and Titanic had stronger fourth weekends even ten years later.  But then, oddly enough, it started behaving like a regular movie just after Memorial Day.  Despite earning $333 million over its first 18 days, it would be earn just $70 million more over its entire run, topping out at $403 million, or the fifth-biggest domestic grosser of all-time (ironically the same slot where Batman ended its run back in 1989 with $251 million).

Spider-Man was uncommonly leggy for a mega-blockbuster, with drops around 35% for each of its weekends after opening until after Memorial Day weekend.  But then, be it due to losing screens or the sheer number of moviegoers who had already seen it multiple times in theaters over the first month, it began to basically collapse.  It was a sobering reminder that even the leggiest blockbuster was basically finished after two months.  Spider-Man crossed $333 million by the end of its fourth weekend yet needed another six weeks to cross $400 million.  Spider-Man crossed the $400 million mark on its tenth weekend and needed another six weeks to earn another $3.5 million.  With the arguable exception of Avatar, Titanic, The Sixth Sense, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, pretty much every would-be leggy blockbuster in recent times (The Dark Knight, Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol, How To Train Your Dragon, etc) was still pretty much played out by the end of their second month.  Spider-Man wasn't really a game-changer in any real sense.  The second wave of comic book movies was already kicked into gear by Blade and X-Men and it wasn't until the 2008 1-2 punch of Iron Man and The Dark Knight that any other comic book film got anywhere near the heights of the Spider-Man franchise.  The big-budget four-quadrant global blockbuster fantasy film kick was kicked into gear by the 1-2 punch in 2001 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. Spider-Man was more a case of being the right movie at the right place at the right time.

Its box office triumph was among the last times I could honestly say I was shocked by a mega-success of one of these kinds of movies.  Its unexpected quality was certainly a part of its success, coming off an uncommonly bad summer season with audiences relieved at a predetermined blockbuster actually taking the time to be a real movie.  With its emphasis on character and story-telling over web-slinging action, Spider-Man really felt like a 'full meal' compared to the likes of Tomb Raider and Planet of the Apes.  I'll go into why the movie was as good as it was later next month, when I discuss the entire Sam Raimi trilogy in the lead up to the reboot.  But I still distinctly remember being weirdly thrilled sitting there in a darkened theater, watching the opening credits and listening to yet another classic Danny Elfman superhero theme.  It seemed unreal to me that I was finally seeing a Spider-Man movie, and it seemed all the more 'unreal' that it turned out to be so damn good.  Sorry folks, you just can't repeat that kind of anticipation with a quickie reboot.  Ten years later, it's the feeling of 'surprise' that sticks with me the most.  The surprise at how damn satisfying the movie was, the surprise at how big its opening weekend turned out to be, and my surprise at how well it played all around the country as it was perhaps the movie that America needed at that time.  Yes, it would have been a smash hit without its 9/11-timeliness, and the 'New Yorkers unite' climactic moment is among the silliest in the movie (why didn't Green Goblin just kill those people and go on with his business?), but it clearly was a movie that benefited from the unfortunate world events at the time.

Ten years later, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man still holds up as among the better origin story comic book pictures of our time, and its groundbreaking success still feels completely earned if only by virtue of how unforced it felt at the time.  Its success was earned, which in this predetermined record-setting blockbuster era, feels almost quaint.

Okay, time to share your Spider-Man thoughts.  Please comment below.

Scott Mendelson