1. Deadpool & Wolverine
Marvel Studios | Week 3
$54.175M Domestic Weekend
$494.3M Domestic Cume | $1,029.5B Global Cume
Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool & Wolverine kept the top spot at the domestic box office for another weekend, narrowly ahead of wife Blake Lively’s drama It Ends With Us. Deadpool’s $54.175M take in its 3rd frame is a -44% drop at 4,330 locations (+100) for a $12,512 Per Screen Average, which is actually less than the Lively film’s $13,847. The two titles helped drive the overall box office +29.4% over this frame last year ($111,923,170 million) when Barbie was still dominating.
The optics of a friendly Reynolds/Lively box office rivalry certainly made for good copy, but it’s unclear how much the manufactured drama actually drove ticket sales.
With an additional $57.8M take in 52 international territories, Deadpool & Wolverine sprinted past the $1 billion global milestone with $1,029.5B. For The Walt Disney Studios overall, this is the 31st film to reach those heights and the 11th in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The team-up movie shot past Avengers: Age of Ultron to become the 6th highest-grossing MCU movie domestically ($130M to go before it beats 2012’s The Avengers), and the 11th globally where it will need $100M more to pass 2019’s Captain Marvel. It overtook 2010’s Alice in Wonderland to become the #48 all-time global grosser.
Overseas the top three markets are China ($54.8M), UK ($54.5M), and Mexico ($38.2M). This weekend it took in $7.1M in IMAX screens globally ($3.8M domestic) for a cume of $78M, the 6th best ever for an MCU title in the large format.
2. It Ends With Us
Sony Pictures | NEW
$50M Domestic Opening Weekend
$80M Global Cume
Sony scored a huge win for the breed of mid-budget, non-IP movies they’re keeping alive in theaters with the romantic drama It Ends With Us, which opened to a projected $50M at 3,611 locations for a PSA of $13,847, right in the high-end ballpark of our prediction panel while other outlets were forecasting as low as $23M. While a miss with critics (RT 59%), the film was a smash with audiences who gave it a 94% audience score, 4½ star PostTrak rating, and “A-” CinemaScore. The film launched by overtaking Deadpool & Wolverine in Friday grosses. Here’s how the 3-Day looked, with $7M in Thursday previews…
- Friday – $24.25M
- Saturday – $13.7M
- Sunday – $12.05M
To put this opening take into perspective, leading lady Blake Lively’s previous highest starring-role grosser was 2016’s The Shallows at $55.1M over its entire domestic run. According to the studio, nearly half of the female-dominated audience (84% women/16% men) was made up of infrequent moviegoers, meaning Sony saw an underserved theatrical market and filled the demand. Many of the top theaters were in middle America including Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Nashville, Charlotte, Indianapolis, and Greenville.
Post Trak added that a relatively small 24% of the audience came to the theater with a partner or date, meaning this is largely women attending alone or with friends ala Challengers earlier this year. About 60% of the audience was between 18-34, with 18-24’s being the largest piece of that pie at 32%, and 68% overall under age 35. Caucasian was the largest demographic with 41%, although Latinos/Hispanics came out in force with 34%.
America was not the only market where the film struck a nerve. Internationally the film debuted to $30M on 7,300+ screens in 42 total markets, 44% ahead of The Fault In Our Stars, 2.7x ahead of Anyone But You, and quadruple Where The Crawdads Sing in like markets. There are still many more markets to go as Sony transforms this modest film into a worldwide event, including France (Aug 14), Germany (Aug 15), Austria (Aug 15), Colombia (Aug 15), Thailand (Aug 15), Indonesia (Aug 16), Italy (Aug 21), China (Aug 30), Taiwan (Aug 30), Singapore (Sept 5), South Korea (Sept), and Japan (Oct).
While on the outside It Ends With Us seemed like the kind of drama the female demo has been getting via streamers like Lifetime or Netflix for years, the viral popularity of author Colleen Hoover was a driving force in getting her audience off the couch and into the multiplex, similar to the Twilight-effect of Stephenie Meyer more than a decade ago. When you have a market like 2024 that is not drowning in one big tentpole after another, it proves that audiences do still want more than IP-driven blockbusters.
While lazy comparisons tried to present the Ryan Reynolds/Blake Lively matchup as this year’s “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, the whole appeal of that was Barbie and Oppenheimer (two tentpole films 180-degrees different) opening on the same day, with hundreds of memes and articles promoting the viral double feature. Counter to this, Deadpool & Wolverine has already made massive bank over two prior weekends, with It Ends With Us being a non-tentpole sleeper posing no threat or galvanizer to its overall box office. The fact that Lively is Reynolds’ wife is more of an interesting asterisk.
4. Borderlands
Lionsgate | NEW
$8.8M Domestic Opening Weekend
Riding in on a wave of bad buzz caused by a replaced director, delayed release, and some of the worst reviews for a major blockbuster in recent memory (10% on Rotten Tomatoes, “D+” CinemaScore), Borderlands opened with a thud this weekend with an estimated $8.8M on 3,125 screens for a PSA of $2,816, on the low end of our forecast. Here’s how the 3-Day looked, including $1M in Thursday previews…
- Friday – $4M
- Saturday – $2.75M
- Sunday – $2.05M
It is a poor showing for a movie based on a wildly popular video game IP with a cast including two Oscar-winners in Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis. Add to that the fact that Borderlands had Kevin Hart back in a video game milieu after two smash hit Jumanji movies with nearly $1.8 billion WW between them (along with fellow Jumanji player Jack Black in a voice role) and this should have been a slam dunk. Its opening gross is actually lower than the debuts of director Eli Roth’s considerably less expensive Death Wish ($13M), The House with a Clock in its Walls ($26.6M), and Thanksgiving ($10.3M).
Combine this with poor reviews (the fourth worst of 2024 according to MetaCritic) on top of years of bad press (it lensed in 2021) and Borderlands was doomed from the jump.
Other Notable Performances
Neon did not repeat their Longlegs success opening the sci-fi horror film Cuckoo in moderate release across 1503 theaters, where it grossed $3,012,500 million over the 3-Day. With a “C+” CinemaScore. The cast is led by Euphoria‘s Hunter Schafer alongside Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, and Dan Stevens. Cuckoo clearly didn’t have the same hook as the Nicolas Cage serial killer film, which took in a similar $2M this weekend in its 5th frame for a $71,251,905 million domestic cume.
Sunday’s Studio Weekend Estimates | Weekend 32 – 2024
Total Domestic Estimates: $158,498,162M | (+29.4% vs 2023)
| Title | Weekend Estimate | % Change | Locations | Location Change | PSA | Domestic Total | Week | Distributor |
| Deadpool & Wolverine | $54,175,000 | -44% | 4,330 | 100 | $12,512 | $494,331,382 | 3 | Walt Disney |
| It Ends With Us | $50,000,000 | 3,611 | $13,847 | $50,000,000 | 1 | Sony Pictures | ||
| Twisters | $15,000,000 | -34% | 3,664 | -345 | $4,094 | $222,262,000 | 4 | Universal |
| Borderlands | $8,800,000 | 3,125 | $2,816 | $8,800,000 | 1 | Lionsgate | ||
| Despicable Me 4 | $8,000,000 | -30% | 3,009 | -367 | $2,659 | $330,132,000 | 6 | Universal |
| Trap | $6,725,000 | -56% | 3,181 | n/c | $2,114 | $28,676,000 | 2 | Warner Bros. |
| Inside Out 2 | $4,956,000 | -27% | 2,200 | -415 | $2,253 | $636,456,948 | 9 | Walt Disney |
| Harold and the Purple Crayon | $3,100,000 | -48% | 3,325 | n/c | $932 | $12,889,000 | 2 | Sony Pictures |
| Cuckoo | $3,012,500 | 1,503 | $2,004 | $3,012,500 | 1 | Neon | ||
| Longlegs | $2,000,000 | -53% | 1,310 | -840 | $1,527 | $71,251,907 | 5 | Neon |
| Dìdi (弟弟) | $650,000 | 44% | 200 | 153 | $3,250 | $1,626,000 | 3 | Focus Features |
| A Quiet Place: Day One | $475,000 | -66% | 468 | -571 | $1,015 | $138,575,000 | 7 | Paramount Pi… |
| Sing Sing | $226,965 | 38% | 39 | 21 | $5,820 | $821,862 | 5 | A24 |
| Bad Boys: Ride or Die | $185,000 | -72% | 152 | -285 | $1,217 | $193,342,000 | 10 | Sony Pictures |
| Fly Me to the Moon | $125,000 | -64% | 193 | -227 | $648 | $20,302,000 | 5 | Sony Pictures |
| CatVideoFest 2024 | $102,330 | -63% | 55 | -51 | $1,861 | $428,561 | 2 | Oscilloscope… |
| Widow Clicquot | $67,500 | -48% | 81 | -16 | $833 | $771,954 | 4 | Vertical Ent… |
| Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes | $35,000 | -59% | 20 | -10 | $1,750 | $171,096,048 | 14 | 20th Century… |
| MaXXXine | $32,079 | -79% | 29 | -41 | $1,106 | $15,082,041 | 6 | A24 |
| Good One | $30,013 | 3 | $10,004 | $30,013 | 1 | Metrograph P… | ||
| War Game | $16,732 | 9% | 5 | 4 | $3,346 | $35,601 | 2 | Submarine De… |
| Janet Planet | $11,177 | n/c | 16 | -5 | $699 | $774,451 | 8 | A24 |
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