Weekend Box Office: 'Aquaman' Eyes $47M; 'Mary Poppins' Holds at No. 2

'Bumblebee' is battling 'Spider-Verse' for No. 3, while 'Vice' laughs past 'Holmes and Watson.'


Warner Bros.' superhero pic Aquaman is keeping up its reign at the holiday box office, where it is expected to earn another $15.5 million on Friday for a projected second-weekend gross of $47 million or more, according to early returns.


If those numbers hold, the superhero tentpole will finish Sunday with a domestic total of $184 million, meaning it could clear $200 million by the end of New Year's Day. Globally, Aquaman swam past the $600 million mark on Thursday, including a foreign haul of $492.2 million.


Disney's Mary Poppins Returns is easily holding at No. 2. The musical is expected to gross between $25 million and $30 million for the weekend, putting its domestic total at $100 million-plus through Sunday.


Heading into the year-end holiday corridor, tracking had suggested Aquaman would be the biggest fish of the Christmas season.


Aquaman and Mary Poppins opened last weekend opposite Bumblebee, which now finds itself in a close race for No. 3 with Sony's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Each are tipped to earn $19 million-$20 million for the weekend (Spider-Verse is in its third outing).


Facing tough competition from Aquaman for fanboys, Bumblebee is eying a domestic total of $65 million through Sunday.


Clint Eastwood's The Mule is expected to round out the top five with weekend earnings of $12 million for a domestic cume of $57 million. The Mule, now in its third weekend, is from Warner Bros.


The studio had triple duty Thursday, when it partnered with Fathom Events for an encore performance of Peter Jackson's World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old in 1,007 theaters. The doc scored a Fathom record with $3.4 million and, including grosses from a previous Fathom event, has earned $5.7 million in the U.S. (They Shall Not Grow Old is already available on DVD in the U.K., where it had a limited theatrical run before airing on the BBC).


Elsewhere for the weekend, Annapurna and director Adam McKay's Dick Cheney biopic Vice, starring Christian Bale, is expected to overtake Holmes & Watson with a projected $8.5 million (both films opened on Christmas Day).


Holmes and Watson may only earn $7 million for the weekend after getting ravaged by critics — its current score on Rotten Tomatoes is 7 percent — and audiences, who slapped the Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly comedy with a rare D+ CinemaScore.


Several awards contenders launched in select theaters on Christmas Day, including On the Basis of Sex, starring Felicity Jones as a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Destroyer, starring Nicole Kidman. On Friday, Sony Pictures Classics opens Stan & Ollie, also starring Reilly, in New York and Los Angeles.