SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME Will Be The First Billion Dollar SPIDER-MAN Film

There are a number of people that have done box office analysis for a living that have concluded that Spider-Man: Far From Home is unlikely to see increases. Scott Mendelson, from Forbes, has actually predicted that Spider-Man: Far From Home will see a decrease in revenue down to $750 million, as a result of both no Iron Man and an abundance of competition. But, like Bruce Banner, I’m not sure that the science supports that. I have taken some time to evaluate what kind of box office performance we can anticipate out of Spider-Man: Far From Home based on the trends that we have seen in the industry around movies of similar positions. Let’s first evaluate the worst-case scenario.
 

It Only Attracts the Same People as Spider-Man: Homecoming
            In this scenario, the exact same people who were interested in an MCU Spider-Man are the only ones going to be interested in Spider-Man: Far From Home. I’m insanely dubious about the prospect that, two multibillion-dollar films later, MCU Spider-Man’s profile hasn’t increased in the least bit since the movie that was essentially the second reboot in five years (a well-received reboot at that). But, in this model, I’m running the most realistic worst-case scenario. The only saving grace in this model is that Spider-Man: Far From Home will open over the Fourth of July long weekend unlike its predecessor.
            Now, before I get started, I’m just letting you guys know that I will be using the multiplier from the original The Amazing Spider-Man. I’m doing this for a few reasons. Reason number one being that The Amazing Spider-Man opened on the Tuesday before the Fourth of July too and was the last Spider-Man film to do so. Reason number two is that The Amazing Spider-Man went up against another box office juggernaut that had a lot of the core demographic audience in common: The Dark Knight Rises. In fact, the space between The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises is the exact same as the space between Spider-Man: Far From Home and The Lion King. While The Dark Knight Rises competed with the demographic of people who liked superhero films and were above the age of 25 (which we’ve seen is the larger group of the audience for MCU films), The Lion King will compete with the demographic of people who were fond of the original animated film and take the kid-friendly audience with it. As a result, I’m more willing to just call this one relatively even, if they might play just ever so slightly differently in the long run. Long story short, I will be using The Amazing Spider-Man multiple from its five-day domestic opening throughout. It is the most comparable multiplier I can use and I think it is the most circumstantially real one that I can use. This might impact the numbers, but I think this is pretty fair given the competition and the long weekend play.
            Now, I’m assuming that the opening day audience will be the same as the opening day audience for Spider-Man: Homecoming, assuming that no one new is at all interested in this next installment. As a result, the opening day that I will be using in this model will be Homecoming’s $50.98 million. From there, I used the common drops that The Amazing Spider-Man had over the weekend. It may fluctuate a bit but it is over the exact same period and I expect that, more or less, it will probably play the same as The Amazing Spider-Man, with its drops and all, throughout this period. Using these data, I come to a box office opening five-day total of $197.89 million. From there, using the 1.91x multiplier that The Amazing Spider-Man had, we get to a grand domestic total of $377.963 million. Using the exact same international numbers as Spider-Man: Homecoming gets us to a worldwide total of $923.929 million.
            Again, I consider this to be the most realistic worst-case scenario for the film. Spider-Man: Far From Home isn’t dropping a week before War for the Planet of Apes, like its predecessor was. Even in China, in which both films opened much later, they were set against each other with only a week separating them. I’m being more than fair to the kind of play that it will get, then, if I only use Spider-Man: Homecoming’s international numbers. I’m confused as to how we get $750 million from this unless we think that there were a ton of people only checking out the original for Iron Man. In which case, I would’ve assumed that they would’ve been fairly disappointed with the lack of Iron Man (who was in five to ten minutes of the movie overall). Instead, they awarded the movie an A CinemaScore. That’s pretty darn good and only beaten by The Avengers, Black Panther, and Avengers: Endgame. Something tells me it was a good marketing strategy to get people in but it was the film, and Spider-Man himself, that made people like it. At worst, realistically, it holds the same audience. But, as I said, I’m insanely dubious. I think that it will increase. The question, then, is how much?
 
It Increases Like Ant-Man and the Wasp Over Its Predecessor
            Ant-Man and the Wasp came out only two months after Avengers: Infinity War, Marvel’s first two billion dollar film. The hype for Marvel content will probably never be as comparable to today’s than it was then. However, there are reasons to give me pause on this comparison. For one thing, Ant-Man wasn’t featured in Avengers: Infinity War. He was featured most prominently in a film two years prior that made just over half Infinity War’s total, Captain America: Civil War. There isn’t nearly as much hype going into a movie that isn’t really directly tied to the prior two billion dollar one other than the brand name. Still, we saw an associated increase from Ant-Man to Ant-Man and the Wasp. This is a realistic jump for Spider-Man: Far From Home to make, even if it might feel a little conservative given the circumstantial differences. And, certainly, we can argue that part of the increase was certainly the film releasing fairly close to Avengers: Infinity War.
            Ant-Man and the Wasp’s opening weekend increased by 32 percent. It increased its international totals by 20 percent from the first one. With that opening weekend increase, we see Spider-Man: Far From Home’s opening five-day frame jump up to $261.21 billion. Again, I think we need to expect legs like The Amazing Spider-Man. Better reception to the movie could drive it higher than that but we haven’t seen the movie so we don’t really have a good idea of that and, again, this was the last Spider-Man movie to release over the extended July Fourth weekend. Applying that domestic multiplier, then, gets us to $498.912 million. Before we balk at this, it’s not unprecedented. We’ve seen Black Panther climb to over $700 million just domestically and all Avengers films climbed quite a bit higher than this in domestic revenue. It isn’t too bad of an idea to suspect that we could see an increase for Spider-Man accordingly that isn’t record-breaking but would certainly have it performing well.
            If we anticipate an overall increase similar to Ant-Man and the Wasp, I suspect that we can see an international total over/under $655.158 million. Combining the domestic gross with the international gross gets Spider-Man: Far From Home to $1.15 billion. That would be just over/under where Captain Marvel fell. That seems to make sense generally with what we’ve been seeing in Marvel grosses, especially if we take a pre-introduced character along with it.
 
Its International Grosses Reflect Venom More Than an Increase Movie-to-Movie
            This one relies on the idea that the increases in international grosses were already done by Venom. Given the property’s strength internationally, and the character being tied to Spider-Man, we might be willing to assume that this character’s performance overseas might pave the way for Spider-Man to perform just as well there. There are a few issues with this proposition too—mainly that Venom wasn’t sold as a connection to Spider-Man but, rather, his own character. However, that also comes with the drawback of being evaluated as a brand-new character which doesn’t give him the edge that Spider-Man would have going back for the second time. So, the argument in this case goes, the effect of both the positivity of seeing something new and the negativity of it being unproven negates one another. Instead, we see Venom’s international gross.
            Assuming that Spider-Man: Far From Home performs more like Spider-Man: Homecoming with The Amazing Spider-Man multipliers domestically, adding Venom’s international total of $641.498 million gets us to a grand total of $1.019 billion. In other words, even if domestically Spider-Man: Far From Home can’t bring in new audiences, is received as “*shrug* it was good”, and legs out like The Amazing Spider-Man, we see Spider-Man: Far From Home just barely crossing the one billion dollar mark. However, what if we see a Spider-Man: Far From Home increase like Ant-Man and the Wasp domestically and Venom’s international gross also increasing like Ant-Man and the Wasp (i.e. the threshold for international grosses was not what it was before Avengers: Endgame—Venom was the peak for a Spider-Man movie prior to that movie)? Well, then we are looking at an over/under of $1.26 billion. That seems a little more realistic to me.
 
Screw Other Films’ Performances—How Does Spider-Man Perform Typically?
            Spider-Man: Homecoming performed like most blockbuster films do—and like most Spider-Man movies do too. It got 35% of its total take domestically and 65% of its total take internationally. What if we expected the interest in Spider-Man: Far From Home to increase proportionally across both domestic and foreign markets similar to Ant-Man and the Wasp levels? In other words, what if we saw the same increase in interest domestically—worldwide? So, if we take Spider-Man: Far From Home’s predicted gross (using the Ant-Man and the Wasp opening weekend multiplier) of $498.912 million and multiply that by the domestic/international multiplier that we saw with Spider-Man: Homecoming, we see the film splash to $1.31 billion. This is certainly on the higher end of the spectrum but this model is, to me, also one of the more realistic ones. Still, like the others, it has problems. Why would we assume that the international box office would increase likewise to have it be 65% of the total take? It isn’t like international figures are always stagnant and can’t change. Indeed, they might change positively for Spider-Man: Far From Home but that increase in interest doesn’t amount to still having 65% of the total take for the movie. That’s entirely possible. But, again, this was based on having Spider-Man: Far From Home play like a movie about two characters that weren’t featured in the two billion dollar film prior. But, what if we were to evaluate it on the basis of Spider-Man having featured in both of the prior two billion dollar films? What would that look like?
 
What if Spider-Man Pulls An Iron Man and Increases (Domestically) Likewise?
            Iron Man 3 launched a year after The Avengers and it broke all kinds of records. It was the second biggest weekend, at the time, behind The Avengers. It was clear that The Avengers had elevated his profile quite a lot: bringing the percentage increase from Iron Man 2’s opening weekend to Iron Man 3’s opening weekend to 36 percent. While I think it is quite clear that the jump in international grosses from Iron Man 2 to Iron Man 3 is unlikely to be replicated by another franchise (it was over double Iron Man 2’s international gross for Iron Man 3), these domestic numbers can predict what could happen for Spider-Man: Far From Home in the most realistic best case scenario.
            Spider-Man: Far From Home’s five-day gross, playing only like Spider-Man: Homecoming with The Amazing Spider-Man’s percentage drops and the like, gets us to an over/under total of $197.886 million. With the multiple of 1.36x that applied to Iron Man’s opening weekend, Spider-Man: Far From Home could see an opening five-day gross of over/under $269.126 million. With The Amazing Spider-Man overall domestic multiplier (I’ve explained several times above why this is the most realistic multiplier) of 1.91x, we see that Spider-Man: Far From Home could hit $514.031 million domestic. Again, this isn’t unprecedented, and it only exceeds the original Spider-Man’s domestic gross by a hundred million. While that might sound like a lot, it really isn’t when adjusted for inflation. While I don’t like adjusting for inflation (there are a number of different contextual variables that impact a film’s box office and we can’t account for those so I refuse to account for the one that we actually can), this would mean, mostly, a return to the original audience for the character. To me, it seems like a possibility at the least. Even so, this is playing up the best case realistic scenario. This doesn’t come close to rivaling Black Panther’s show of dominance, so I think we’re okay.
            Now, there are a number of ways that Spider-Man: Far From Home hits a billion in this scenario. We could have the worst case international scenario, where the international numbers from the first to the second don’t increase at all, and we still get a worldwide cumulative total of over/under $1.059 billion. If it sees an Iron Man 3 increase domestically and an Ant-Man and the Wasp international increase, we see Spider-Man: Far From Home making $1.17 billion. If it just plays as well as Venom internationally, with these domestic numbers, we see the film making $1.15 billion. If we manage to see Spider-Man: Far From Home’s international numbers increase from Venom’s like Ant-Man and the Wasp’s did over its predecessor, we see an over/under cumulative gross of $1.28 billion. Ever better is if see the average Spider-Man split of domestic/international numbers, we see Spider-Man: Far From Home climbing to $1.35 billion (or the highest number so far on this list).
            In any case, there is virtually no way that Spider-Man: Far From Home doesn’t hit a billion in this model.
 
Overall, I think it is quite clear that if the film plays like a post-event Marvel movie should, even if the comparison is to characters that didn’t partake in the festivities, we see that Spider-Man: Far From Home will be the first Spider-Man film to make a billion dollars. The only way that I don’t see that happening is if Spider-Man’s audience shrunk (super unlikely) or that the audience that wanted to see Spider-Man is always, and will always be, only the audience that wants to see Spider-Man. However, given it is Marvel, I expect the movie to be received well and actually increase that The Amazing Spider-Man multiple too. I expect any one of the above situations to happen instead. As a result, I’m predicting, long-term, a total box office of $1.15 to $1.2 billion. It could go higher or it could go lower. But I don’t see a way, truly realistically, that we don’t see Spider-Man: Far From Home finally swing to a billion and beyond.