'Spider-Man' Swings to No. 1 at Box Office

By David Germain

LOS ANGELES -- Your new friendly neighborhood Spider-Man has spun himself a $65 million opening weekend and $140 million in his first six days at U.S. theaters.

Overseas, Sony's (SNE) The Amazing Spider-Man added $129.1 million, raising its international total to $201.6 million and worldwide haul to $341.2 million since it began rolling out a week earlier in some foreign markets.

The movie started off as a smaller domestic moneymaker than the previous three Spidey films, but it laid to rest objections that it was too soon to relaunch the superhero franchise.

The new origin story for the Marvel Comics web-slinger comes just five years after Spider-Man 3, Tobey Maguire and director Sam Raimi's final movie in a series that shattered box-office records.

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"This was never modeled or was never meant to be Spider-Man 4. This was always a relaunch with a new cast and different stories to tell, and quite frankly, it succeeded beyond our imaginations," said Rory Bruer, Sony's head of distribution.

The previous weekend's No. 1 film, Universal's teddy-bear comedy Ted, fell to second-place with $32.6 million, raising its domestic total to $120.2 million.

Among new releases, Oliver Stone's drug-war thriller Savages opened at No. 4 with a solid $16.2 million weekend, also for Universal. Paramount's concert film Katy Perry: Part of Me failed to pack in the pop star's fans, debuting a distant No. 8 with just $7.2 million.

Going into wide release after two weekends in a handful of theaters, Woody Allen's ensemble romance To Rome with Love broke into the top-10 with $3.5 million. The Sony Pictures Classics release lifted its domestic total to $5.3 million.

The Amazing Spider-Man bumped up U.S. receipts, with Hollywood pulling in an estimated $200 million overall for the weekend, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com. That's a 28.6% increase over the same weekend last year, when Transformers: Dark of the Moon led with $47.1 million in its second weekend.

Leading up to the domestic debut of Amazing Spider-Man last Tuesday, Hollywood had expectations of a six-day total of around $120 million for the film by the end of Fourth of July weekend. That proved a conservative projection, but studio executives genuinely were uncertain how well the film might do so close on the heels of the previous Spider-Man series.

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