Box Office: 'Avengers: Endgame' Superhero Fatigues To Record $157 Million Friday - Forbes

'Avengers Endgame' Chinese poster

Walt Disney

It was just under four years ago when I started doing that “thing” where I attend an opening day showing of a huge movie in the IMAX format for the specific purpose of watching the big new trailers in the best possible format. It was Avengers: Age of Ultron, and despite being 12:30 pm on the first day of domestic release, it was a pretty empty theater. A month later, the afternoon IMAX showing of Jurassic World was slightly more crowded, but the pattern has remained accordingly.

I did this activity yesterday with Avengers: Endgame, attending a 3:00 pm showing at my nearest IMAX theater. For the first time in forever, I struggled to find parking. For the first time in forever, the seats I wanted were not available, and the entire theater was (save for the front two rows) entirely sold out.

Watching that five-minute IMAX Godzilla: King of the Monsters preview in the front row of an IMAX theater is an experience. But I digress. If the relative crowd of my casual Friday afternoon matinee is any indication, not only is Avengers: Endgame going to shatter every short-term box office record in existence, but it may play frighteningly close to maximum capacity even outside the peak moviegoing hours.

Anyway, you didn’t come here for anecdotes. You came here for numbers. Here’s a number: $96.7 million. Avengers: Endgame earned $96.7 million on Friday in North America. No, I don’t mean its full opening day. I mean it earned around $97 million in “pure Friday” grosses, not even counting the record-breaking $60 million in Thursday previews.

It’s about what The Lost World earned in its record-setting Fri-Mon debut ($93 million) in 1997. That’s about what Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone made on its opening weekend ($90 million) to set a new record back in 2001. It’s about what Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II earned on its record-smashing opening day ($91 million) in 2011. It's close to Iron Man's then-huge $102 million debut weekend (counting Thursday previews) that started this whole thing in 2008.

Its pure Friday was, without those preview grosses, just over/under the  full opening days of The Avengers ($80 million in 2012), Avengers: Age of Ultron ($84 million in 2015), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II ($91 million in 2011), The Last Jedi ($105 million in 2017), Avengers: Endgame ($106 million in 2018) and The Force Awakens ($119 million in 2015).

Avengers 4 barely needed the Thursday previews to break the single day record. Avengers: Endgame has an opening day gross of $156.7 million, or essentially equal to Spider-Man 3’s record-busting $151 million Fri-Sun debut in 2007 and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire's $158 million opening weekend in 2013 (both sans 3-D).

Unless it’s the most frontloaded movie of all time this weekend, Avengers: Endgame will easily pass the $258 million Fri-Sun debut weekend of Avengers: Infinity War. Unless it’s as frontloaded as Harry Potter 7.2 ($169 million from a $91 million Friday), we’re looking at a $300 million-plus opening weekend. If by some miracle it merely plays like a “normal” big MCU movie this weekend (2.4x-to-2.6x), it will score a debut between $380 million and $412 million.

There are big movies that scored over/under 2x multipliers (Disney’s Christmastime Star Wars movies, The Dark Knight Rises, etc.) that went on to have perfectly fine post-debut legs. A mere 2.21x multiplier will give it a $350 million weekend. That would be as big of a jump as Deathly Hallows I ($125 million) to Deathly Hallows II ($169 million).

We can talk post-debut legs (and a possible $1 billion-plus global opening) tomorrow, but a 2.23x multiplier (think Captain America: Civil War) from a $340 million debut weekend puts it just over Avatar’s unadjusted $760 million domestic total. For the record, I don’t think The Force Awakens’ $936 million domestic milestone is in any peril (those Christmas legs won’t be replicated in late April/early May). Heck, Avengers: Endgame may be the first movie to join the $200 million losers club if it earns $200 million less in weekend two than in weekend one, but wouldn’t that be a hell of a problem to have?

For that matter, even if it tops $1 billion worldwide by tomorrow (which at this juncture is more likely than not), it would still have to be unexpectedly leggy (in the face of some harsh May competition) to threaten Avatar’s $2.778 billion global finish. But, again, with $725 million worldwide (counting a record-setting $81.82 million Saturday in China), that’s not a big problem.

Like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II once upon a time, this MCU season finale/series finale roped in pretty much everyone who has ever seen an MCU movie in a movie theater over the last 11 years. Even though Marvel and Disney diabolically sold Avengers: Infinity War as the end of the end (#WhateverItTakes, right?), audiences were fine with the cliffhanger and were okay with essentially being sold “Okay, we really mean it this time, it’s totally the end!” yet again.

Moreover, a super-duper spoiler-free marketing campaign (with 90% of the footage from the first half-hour along with shockingly few TV spots and film clips) emphasized that, while there would be more MCU movies, this was (more-or-less, no spoilers) the end of the journey for Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow and Captain America. Strong reviews and a decade of goodwill paid off in spades.

As much as we might decry the state of fictional cinema as audiences seem only willing to see the biggest movies in theaters (and the biggest movies are usually superhero flicks), this is an earned debut. This wasn’t (all due respect) Walt Disney buying Lucasfilm and making a direct sequel to Return of the Jedi (arguably cashing in on the work done by the previous six Star Wars movies) and then watching the Star Wars fans roll in. This is the culmination of a decade’s worth of good-to-great (save for a few stinkers) comic book action fantasies that did the work in making B or C-level Marvel characters into A-level movie stars.

Yes, Paramount doesn’t get enough credit for selling Iron Man, Thor and Captain America, but the triumph was an ongoing one filtered through Marvel Studios no matter which studio was distributing a given flick. Even the worst MCU movies were (like Harry Potter) character plays first, action fantasies second and worldbuilding exercises a distant third.

The folks who showed up and will show up did so not because they liked superhero movies or even because they liked Marvel Comics. They have gravitated toward the specific cinematic incarnations (Chris Evans’ Captain America, Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, etc.) of these particular MCU characters and very much wanted to see how their story would end.

The franchise pulled off a win/win, operating as a cinematic universe while also releasing crowd-pleasing films that more-or-less stood on either own even within a given franchise or the overall mythology. You didn’t need to see Iron Man 3 to enjoy Guardians of the Galaxy and you didn’t need to see Doctor Strange to enjoy Black Panther. But this weekend, everyone is seeing Avengers: Endgame.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2019/04/27/box-office-avengers-endgame-superhero-fatigues-to-record-friday/

2019-04-27 14:25:00Z
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