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Spider-Man 2 swings in at number 1

New York — Spider-Man can still sling it at the box office.


The Amazing Spider-Man 2 debuted with $92m in North American theaters over the weekend. It was a solid opening for Sony's Columbia Pictures, which has released five movies about Marvel's web-slinging superhero in the last 14 years.



The release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 essentially kicks off Hollywood's summer season and its annual parade of sequels and spectacle. Marvel movies have regularly commenced summer moviegoing in recent years, and the "Spider-Man 2" opening begins the season with a business-as-usual blockbuster performance.

Last week's No. 1 film, the female revenge comedy The Other Woman, starring Cameron Diaz, slid to a distant second with $14m in its second weekend.

The rebooted Spider-Man franchise starring Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone isn't performing quite as strongly as Sam Raimi's trilogy with Tobey Maguire. On opening weekends, the Raimi films grossed, in order: $114.1m, $88.2m and $151.1m.

The Amazing Spider-Man, also directed by Marc Webb, opened on a Tuesday in 2012, making $62m on its debut weekend and $137m over its first six days.

The new sequel, which began rolling out overseas two weeks ago, is also doing huge international business. It has already grossed $161m abroad, and it added another $116 million over the weekend.

That included $10.4 million from China, where it opened Sunday on a record 11,002 screens. And it set a record for Hollywood titles in India with a $6.5m debut.

"Everywhere we opened just popped," said Rory Bruer, head of domestic distribution for Sony.

Domestically, families made up 33% of the audience of the PG-13 The Amazing Spider-Man 2, a high percentage for a superhero film.

"It did seem to have a very strong component to the film, which we felt was an opportunity," Bruer said. "It also lends itself to a picture that will be around the market for a while, too."

Stiff competition ahead

But as Hollywood's summer rolls on, the competition gets stiffer. In two weeks, Warner Bros. opens the highly anticipated monster movie "Godzilla."




Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for box-office tracker Rentrak, said that shouldn't pose problems for the Marvel juggernaut.

"In the summer, two weeks is a lot of time between blockbusters," Dergarabedian said. "You don't see this kind of consistency in a particular genre that often."

Spider-Man follows Marvel's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, released by Disney, by just a month. (The Captain America sequel is still in the top 5, with $7.8m in its fifth week.)

The marketplace made way for Spider-Man over the weekend with no other new wide releases. Sony's Heaven Is for Real continued to appeal to faith-based audiences, hauling in $8.7m in its third week.

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