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Your Real Box Office Champion of 2021 Is…

No Time to Die still
Photo courtesy of MGM
Matthew Belloni
November 14, 2021

Last year, most of the personal achievements in professional sports came with an asterisk due to the Covid-shortened seasons. The M.L.B. pitcher who won the Cy Young that year, for instance, started calling himself the Mickey Mouse Cy Young Award Winner on social media.

So who’s taking the Mickey Mouse Box Office Award for highest-grossing movie of 2021? It’s not Disney, actually. With its strong opening this weekend in Australia, No Time to Die is now projected to cross F9’s $721.1 million global number sometime around Thanksgiving, according to both MGM, its domestic distributor, and Universal, which handled most overseas territories. With neither Eternals nor Venom: There Will Be Carnage getting a China release, and nothing major coming before year’s end (except Spider-man: No Way Home, which drops Dec. 17 and will earn mostly in 2022), it’s safe to say the Bond film played a long game and came out on top.