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Avengers Endgame.jpg

Box Office Report: Gee, What Film Made Lots of Money This Weekend?

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | April 28, 2019 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | April 28, 2019 |


Avengers Endgame.jpg

We all knew that Avengers: Endgame was going to make all the money, but even the most generous estimates probably couldn’t have predicted that it would make $350 million domestically this weekend. It’s already soared past $1.2 billion worldwide in one week, which means it’s made more in seven days than Captain Marvel has in eight weeks. Not too shabby if we do say so ourselves. To put this into perspective, Avengers: Endgame has broken the record for highest worldwide opening, for opening day gross, for single day gross, for largest theatre averages, for widest release, for fastest grossing of $350 million, and biggest foreign opening weekends. Truly, it has all the records. Well, not quite. Do you think this film can break past $2.7 billion, the amount made by Avatar that remains the highest grossing film ever made? That movie was bolstered by 3D screening prices, which Endgame doesn’t have but I doubt it’ll need them. I think this is going to break that record, or at the very least come exceptionally close to it. Endgame also gave Captain Marvel a boost two months into its run, jumping from four to two and seeing its own domestic gross pass $413 million.

What we see elsewhere on the box office report is a lot of massive changes to theatre count. Cinemas were making room for Marvel in a super dramatic way, partly because Disney’s theatrical demands require it. You need to agree to a certain amount of screenings a day for a specific period of time to get a hold of these films. So we see things like Pet Sematary, in its fourth week of release, drop 1491 theatres from its run, or Hellboy, down at number 14 after a mere three weeks, taking a 91% drop from the previous week as it shed 2376 theatres. The only exceptions to this are indie films like Red Joan and Family, and those were hardly Marvel competition. Still, alternate programming can work now and then. Not often, mind you, in cases like this, but not everyone wants to see a mega-blockbuster like this.

I think this was the reasoning behind putting The White Crow in super limited release this week. Ralph Fiennes’s biopic of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev (which is a fine film and you can read my review here) opened in five theatres to a $80k weekend. Not bad, but can it open wider or will Sony Pictures Classics simply not bother?

Shockingly, this coming week of releases is relatively low-key, with the biggest films being the comedy Long Shot, animation Uglydolls, and Dennis Quaid thriller The Intruder?

You can check out the rest of the weekend box office here.

What films did you watch this weekend and how did you enjoy Avengers: Endgame? Please keep these comments a spoiler-free zone. We have a whole post for that stuff!



Header Image Source: Disney // Marvel Studios