Welcome to Week 18 of the Knock on Wood Movie Fantasy League dispatch. Every week (more or less), we’ll bring you a recap of the past weekend’s box office, alongside an overview of the new release films and an updated leaderboard, complete with full teams and points!
As we creep towards the finish line, the domestic box office has never been stronger. The numbers were up 207.4% from last weekend, almost four times The Odyssey’s opening weekend. This time, two box office juggernauts are duking it out for the top spot, and though Spidey was victorious this week (more on that soon), it made for the biggest domestic weekend in history – unadjusted for inflation – and it’s almost entirely down to Marvel and Christopher Nolan. Moana, last week’s #2, has been punted down to #5, and both Toy Story 5 and Minions & Monsters climbed a few spots, undoubtedly receiving that animated family bump inevitable in the third weekend of an R-rated sensation. Evil Dead Burn also jumped up one spot, while The Invite held strong at #7. The biggest drops in the Top Ten (excepting Hadestown: The Musical, which lost a chunk of its theaters this week to Spider-Man) belonged to both Evil Dead and Young Washington, the latter of which is finally threatening to drop out of the Ten. Speaking of, it is my great displeasure to say that, in its twelfth box office weekend, Obsession has finally dropped out of the Top Ten. We’ll properly eulogize it at a later date, but its eleven-week run is nothing short of extraordinary. Gone from the charts, but not our hearts.
The biggest (and only League-eligible) new release this week is, of course, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the fourth Tom Holland Spider-Man solo feature from Marvel Studios. Not only did it grab the biggest domestic opening day of all time (and without IMAX screens!), but it went on to the biggest domestic weekend of all time, beating Avengers: Endgame, which held the record for over seven years. Marvel Studios now holds the four biggest domestic opening weekends of all time, which also include Spider-Man: No Way Home and Avengers: Infinity War (all four of which star Tom Holland and also feature the CEO of Sex himself, Jacob Batalon!). It’s no wonder Spider-Man is doing gangbusters at the box office; the web-slinger has always been one of Marvel’s most widely appealing characters of all time, and if it wasn’t certain before, Brand New Day’s performance has solidified it. It’s now practically guaranteed to pass $2 billion worldwide, placing it within an elite echelon of films that number only seven as of writing. Notably, the film also made a jump late Monday into the Letterboxd Top 500, which means even more points for those who drafted it for the Fantasy League. The biggest question now is whether or not Avengers: Doomsday can rival it, or if the friendly neighborhood wall-crawler’s latest adventure will remain the highest-grossing MCU movie of the year…
Also out this week is Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, a provocatively blistering satire of Gen Z, sexual conventions, and the world of fine art starring Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde; Soulm8te, a forgettable direct-to-VOD spinoff of the M3GAN franchise; and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s chanbara mystery The Samurai and the Prisoner, which is (currently) only available in three US theaters, but has become Kurosawa’s first film to pass 1 billion yen at the Japanese box office.
Some additional housekeeping: last week, I made the executive decision to remove Amazon MGM’s 4 Kids Walk Into a Bank from the Fantasy League slate due to a lack of release (despite sources claiming it was due out in August), and more recently, it was quietly pushed to an unspecified date in 2027. It’s not great news for the film, but at least it clears up its standing in this Fantasy League.
Check out our leaderboard here. For the most up-to-date scoring on each movie, check out this spreadsheet. Additionally, I’ve made a Letterboxd list of every film chosen by our players for the Fantasy League. You can view that anytime here.
Next week (interestingly enough, no week-long break to avoid competition with Spider-Man as there was with The Odyssey), we have a trio of unexpected counterparts, each of which offers something different to the moviegoing audience: One Night Only is the endearing rom-com equivalent of The Purge, Super Troopers 3 provides a menagerie of ridiculous stoner comedy, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma takes its audience on a violent, psychedelic, and sexy journey into the depths of queer horror culture. Or, you could just see Spider-Man again. Many people probably will.
As a reminder, submissions for the MFL are now closed. Thank you all for playing, and I am very much looking forward to seeing the board change every which way over the next few months! Please let us know if you have any feedback, and don’t forget to come back here next week for a recap and the updated leaderboard!
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