NEW YORK -- After a month at No. 1, "Spider-Man: No Way Home" has finally been overtaken at the box office. Paramount Pictures' "Scream" reboot debuted with $30.6 million in ticket sales over the weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday.
"Scream," a self-described "requel" that is the fifth film in the franchise and a reboot introducing a new, younger cast, led all releases over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. Paramount says it added another $18 million in 50 international markets.
That made for a solid revival for the self-aware slasher franchise. Rights to the "Scream" films, once a reliable cash cow for Harvey and Bob Weinstein's Miramax Films, were acquired by Spyglass Media Group, which produced the new film with Paramount. This "Scream," directed by Matt Bettinello-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, was the first not directed by Wes Craven, who died in 2015. It features original "Scream" cast members Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette alongside new additions Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega and Jack Quaid.
Most notably, "Scream" is the first box-office success in a year that Hollywood hopes will see a return to weekly stability at movie theaters. January is typically a quiet period at the box office, but the surge of the omicron variant in covid-19 has further upended release plans of some winter movies.
"All of our traditional measures were indicating a solid opening, but as I kept telling people: We're still in this thing and it's very difficult to determine what will actually happen," said Chris Aronson, distribution chief for Paramount. "Now we're open, people have seen the movie and we're off and running. Hopefully this becomes another building block toward building the business back and getting it back to some semblance of normalcy."
Meanwhile, "Spider-Man: No Way Home" slipped to second place but continued to rise in the record books. The film grossed $20.8 million in its fifth weekend of release. Columbia Pictures predicts that "No Way Home" will reach a domestic cumulative total of $703.9 million, edging "Black Panther" and moving into fourth place all-time.
Universal Pictures' "Sing 2" landed in third place in its fourth weekend with $8.3 million over the three-day weekend. The animated sequel has grossed $122.1 million domestically and $96.3 million internationally.
While the debut of "Scream" could be celebrated by Paramount, which postponed most of its top 2021 releases to 2022 (movies including "Top Gun: Maverick" and "Mission Impossible 7"), its performance also typified current box-office realities. Superhero movies and genre films that appeal to younger audiences have bounced back to near pre-pandemic levels, while films skewing more mature moviegoers haven't.
The only other new widely released movie over the weekend was "Belle," Mamoru Hosoda's critically acclaimed anime riff on "Beauty and the Beast." It debuted with $1.6 million in 1,326 theaters.
Hollywood is aiming to make 2022 a comeback year, with big movies making their debuts exclusively in cinemas after studios dabbled last year with simultaneous releases in theaters and on streaming services. But with surging covid-19 cases and a light first-quarter slate, it's unlikely U.S. and Canadian theaters will approach the $11.4 billion in box office receipts generated in 2019. Bloomberg Intelligence now forecasts about $8 billion in receipts in the two countries this year, which would be almost double that of 2021.
Some of the films generating the most buzz these days were made for streaming services, including Netflix Inc.'s "Don't Look Up." The climate change satire is already among the service's most popular films.