'No Time To Die' Tops Box Office With $56M: Why 007 Underperformed

To no one’s surprise, “No Time to Die,” the 25th entry in the James Bond series and the final feature with Daniel Craig as 007, was the top grossing film at the weekend U.S. box office. However, the film’s financial performance was weaker than many people anticipated.

What Happened: United Artists Releasing opened “No Time to Die” in 4,407 theaters and recorded $56 million in ticket sales. While that return would be respectable on its own terms, it was considerably lower than three of the four previous 007 epics with Craig as the lead: 2012’s “Skyfall” grossed $88.3 million in its first U.S. weekend in theaters, while 2015’s “Spectre” (the last 007 film prior to the new title) took in $70.4 million and 2008’s “Quantum of Solace” grossed $67.5 million.

Part of the problem for “No Time to Die” was the continued vibrancy of “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” which broke the pandemic-era box office record in its premiere last weekend with $90.1 million in ticket sales. The Tom Hardy film from AT&T’s T Warner Bros. ranked second at the weekend box office with $32 million from 4,225 screens.

Rounding out the top five from the weekend was United Artists Releasing’s “Addams Family 2” with $10 million from 4,207 theaters, The Walt Disney Co’s DIS “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” with $4.2 million from 2,800 screens, and “The Many Saints of Newark” from AT&T’s New Line Releasing with $1.45 million from 3,181 theaters.

Two off-beat titles cracked the top 10: the Icelandic horror film “Lamb” from A24 absorbed $1 million from 583 theaters, and Fathom Events’ HD presentation of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Boris Gudonov” brought in $387,000 from its single-day Oct. 9 engagement in 791 theaters.

What Happens Next: The upcoming weekend will see if “No Time to Die” can withstand the impact of two highly anticipated films: Ridley Scott’s 14th century adventure “The Last Duel” starring Matt Damon, Adam Driver and Ben Affleck, distributed by Disney’s 20th Century Studios, and David Gordon Green’s “Halloween Kills” from Comcast Corporation’s CMCSA Universal Pictures, a sequel to the filmmaker’s 2018 remake of “Halloween” with Jamie Lee Curtis reviving her role from the 1978 horror masterwork.

“The Last Duel” is a theatrical-exclusive release while “Halloween Kills” is also being shown on the Peacock streaming service.

Elsewhere across the upcoming weekend, the drama “Hard Luck Love Song” and the animated comedy “Monster Family 2” will be in limited theatrical release via Roadside Attractions and Viva Pictures, respectively, while Todd Haynes’ documentary “The Velvet Underground” about the groundbreaking 1960s band will have a limited theatrical release and a simultaneous premiere on Apple’s AAPL Apple TV+.

Also Happening: Art house distributor Neon is taking a unique approach to its U.S. release of “Memoria,” the Colombian entry in the Academy Award competition for Best International Feature. Rather than open the film in multiple cities simultaneously, it is presenting “Memoria” one city at a time in a long series of week-long engagements.

The film, the first Spanish-language feature by the acclaimed Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, will open Dec. 26 at the IFC Center. According to an IndieWire report, Neon described the “Memoria” release as a “deliberate and methodical approach, moving from city to city, theater to theater, week by week, playing in front of only one solitary audience at any given time.”

Neon added that it only plans to make “Memoria” available for theatrical screening and will not release it on the DVD, on-demand or streaming platforms.

Actress Tilda Swinton, the film’s star, applauded this approach.

“‘Memoria’ is the perfect film for this,” she said. “Big cinema or bust – throughout the universe, in perpetuity.”

Photo: Daniel Craig and Ana de Armas in "No Time to Die," courtesy of United Artists Releasing.