Scream overtakes Spider-Man: No Way Home at the box office with a £22.3 million debut

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After a month at the top of the box office, Spider-Man: No Way Home has been overtaken by Paramount’s Scream.

According to studio estimates, the reboot of the 1996 horror film debuted with £22.3m in ticket sales over the weekend.

No Way Home grossed £15.2m in its fifth weekend of release.

Scream follows the story of brutal murders that shocked the quiet town of Woodsboro, California, 25 years ago. A new killer dons the Ghostface mask and begins targeting a group of teenagers to resurrect secrets from the town’s deadly past.

The film – which features Jenna Ortega, Neve Campbell, and Courtney Cox – is the first box-office success in a year that Hollywood hopes will see a return to weekly stability at movie theatres.

January is typically a quiet period at the box office, but the surge of the omicron variant has further upended the release plans of some winter movies.

“All of our traditional measures were indicating a solid opening, but as I kept telling people, we’re still in this thing and it’s very difficult to determine what will actually happen,” said Chris Aronson, distribution chief for Paramount.

“Now we’re open, people have seen the movie and we’re off and running. Hopefully, this becomes another building block toward building the business back and getting it back to some semblance of normalcy.”

You can read The Independent’s four-star review here.

Additional reporting by AP