‘Avengers: Infinity War’ is definitely living up to the hype when it comes to receipts. In the U.S., its weekend gross was $120.2 million, which is the second-best second weekend on record, trailing behind ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’. Its domestic total for the nine days it has been out is $400M, once again, second-best to only ‘The Force Awakens’. However, last weekend over all, was the highest grossing weekend at the box office, even better than when ‘The Force Awakens’ opened.
‘Infinity War”s huge opening pushed Disney into the $1 billion spot for the year, the fastest any studio has reached that mark. Now, with its global grosses tallied in, ‘Infinity War’ has hit the $1 billion mark all by itself. With international grosses, Disney has now done over $3 billion for the year, which is also a record. Once again, the movie hasn’t even opened in China, the second-largest market for U.S. films. When it arrives there on May 11, expect the numbers to skyrocket. Unlike ‘Star Wars’, the Chinese audience has embraced the Marvel Universe series of movies.
According to social media analysts Relish Mix, ‘Infinity War’ has people buzzing online like never before. Online chatter about this film jumped since its opening to 2.3 billion posts.
“Upon exiting theatres, the hashtag/tag frenzy continues for #InfinityWar and @Avengers over-indexing all week between 440k to 540k posts-per-day and a total of 5.8M unique Twitter posts over the last 30-days.”
According to online activity, many fans are going back to see ‘Infinity War’ a second or even third time. Repeat business could help this film to fend off any upcoming rivals.
Last weekend, the opening of ‘Infinity War’ helped drive the last Marvel film, ‘Black Panther’ back into the Top Five. It isn’t quite there this weekend– it’s #7– but ‘Black Panther’ still took in $3M, which isn’t bad for a movie that’s been out for months.
The only new movie to make a dent this weekend was the remake of ‘Overboard’ starring Anna Faris and Eugenio Derbez. Last year, Derbez scored a huge crossover comedy hit with ‘How To Be A Latin Lover’. Lionsgate actively courted Derbez’s Latin American fan base and it worked. With $14.5M, ‘Overboard’ came in second for the weekend, but like last week, that’s a bit lopsided, when you consider that the #1 movie made over $120M.
TOP FIVE:
- Avengers: Infinity War (Disney) – $120.2M
- Overboard (Lionsgate/MGM) – $14.5M
- A Quiet Place (Paramount) – $7.7M
- I Feel Pretty (STX) – $5.2M
- Rampage (New Line/Warner Brothers) – $4.5M
As we move forward into the summer season, don’t expect movies with single-digit tallies to remain in the Top Five. Those types of movies will start getting muscled out by the onslaught of big-budget tentpoles.
If anything, next week’s ‘Life of the Party’ starring Melissa McCarthy, will take a chunk of the audience from ‘Overboard’ and ‘I Feel Pretty’. It will also work as counter programming to ‘Avengers’ by targeting a female audience which may not be interested in superhero fare. But it’s doubtful that it could possibly unseat ‘Infinity War’ at the top.
The week after next sees the release of ‘Deadpool 2’, which may or may not be able to take down ‘Infinity War’. We’ll have to wait and see. Then after that, ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ opens on May 25. As of right now, ‘Solo”s advance ticket sales are incredibly high, topping those for ‘Black Panther’ which had previously set a record.
Check back to see how well ‘Infinity War’ holds up next weekend!
Source: Deadline
