After a year-and-a-half delay, Daniel Craig‘s final turn as James Bond won the North American box office with a $56 million debut. No records were shaken but it was still enough to stir the top spot at #1.
Marking the third highest Craig / Bond opening, No Time To Die fell short of the previous two Bond adventures. Skyfall ranks highest with $88 million while the more recent Spectre pulled in $70 million. Muting NTTD‘s potential: an ongoing pandemic and its nearly three-hour run time, a factor that limited the number of showings NTTD could run — and tickets it could sell — in a given day.
The Bond franchise also skews older with audiences than juggernauts like Marvel and Star Wars; so, all things considered, this was a good start for a movie that had to wait 18 months to open after becoming the first major release of 2020 to be yanked from release due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
NTTD‘s current global tally is $313 million, which includes international earnings from last week when it opened in other major global territories. That number already puts it past the film’s reported $250 million budget, but it still has a way to go for profitability given the marketing bill that racked up following three different “almost” openings during the unpredictable COVID marketplace.
Last week’s #1 movie Venom: Let There Be Carnage was strong enough to eat up another $32 million domestically, bringing its North American total to $141 million and worldwide receipts to $185 million.
The rest of the Top 5 was far behind the top two. At #3, The Addams Family 2 spooked up $10 million ($31.1M total) and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings held at #4 with $4.2 million ($212M total, making it the highest grossing film in North America for 2021 so far; its $402 million worldwide total still trails other Hollywood tentpoles F9: The Fast Saga at $716M and Godzilla vs. Kong at $468M).
The Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark squeaked in at #5 with $1.4 million, and its 10-day $7.4 million total remains well below its $50 million budget. However, Warner Bros is reporting a big audience for the movie on its streamer HBO Max as well as a huge spike for episodes of The Sopranos so, on the whole, Warner Media is probably considering their theater/streamer hybrid release strategy a solid win.