Spider-Man 3 Smashes Opening-Day Records to Kick Off Summer Movie Season

"Spider-Man 3" opened in U.S. theaters Friday morning and immediately set a new single-day box-office record, with Sony Pictures reporting an opening-day take in the neighborhood of $59 million across more than 4,200 theaters. The Sam Raimi-directed third film in the franchise plays on roughly 10,000 screens nationwide, the widest release Sony has ever opened, and is on track to set a new opening-weekend record by Sunday night.

Tobey Maguire returns as Peter Parker, with Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson and James Franco as Harry Osborn. The third installment introduces three new antagonists — Topher Grace as the rival photographer Eddie Brock and the symbiote-driven Venom, Thomas Haden Church as the sand-shifting Flint Marko / Sandman, and a re-cast Green Goblin storyline carried by Franco. The film runs 139 minutes, the longest of the trilogy, and was made on a production budget widely reported in the $250 million-plus range, the most expensive film ever produced.

Reviews have been more mixed than for the first two films. Critics have generally praised the special-effects sequences — a Sandman creation scene built almost entirely from particle simulations, a black-suit Spider-Man fight with Venom in a midtown construction site, a Times Square crane-collapse rescue in the second act — while raising questions about the story's ambition to fold three villains, two romantic storylines and Peter Parker's symbiote-driven dark turn into a single film. Audience polling at theaters Friday morning, however, has been strong enough that Sony is publicly forecasting an opening weekend north of $130 million.

In South Florida, the film opened on multiple screens at the AMC Sunrise 24, the Regal Sawgrass 23 and the AMC Aventura 24, with midnight Thursday showings selling out at most locations. The South Florida AMC theaters added 3 a.m., 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. showtimes for Friday morning to handle demand. Lines outside the Sunrise and Sawgrass complexes wrapped past the parking-deck entrances by 11:30 p.m. Thursday.

For high school seniors three weeks from graduation, "Spider-Man 3" lands at the top of a stacked summer-movie calendar that already has "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" coming in late May, "Shrek the Third" the same week, and "Transformers" arriving in early July. Sony has scheduled the film's international rollout in waves through May.