We’ve seen many false starts over the course of the last eighteen months, but is the movie business back for real this time? Looking at what’s been happening across the last couple of weeks, there’s more reason to be optimistic than there has been for the longest time.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings recently became the first title since Bad Boys for Life to reach $200 million domestic, while Venom: Let There Be Carnage could end up scoring the highest-grossing opening weekend of the pandemic if it winds up on the higher end of projections when the dust settles on Sunday.
To cap it all off, No Time to Die is on course for a whopping international haul of $113 million from its first weekend in theaters, as per Deadline. The 25th installment in the James Bond franchise was delayed by eighteen months, and that pent-up demand has clearly had a huge effect on audiences.
That’ll make No Time to Die the first pandemic-era film to net over $100 million in a single overseas weekend without an assist from China, where it’s releasing in a couple of weeks. That’s hugely encouraging news for both Daniel Craig’s swansong and the industry at large, with October shaping up to be a potential turning point as thing slowly but surely begin to return to some semblance of normality.
