What a week it’s been for Marvel’s Black Panther.
Since its U.S. release on February 16th, the Afrocentric actioner has blazed a trail straight into Hollywood’s hall of fame, notching all sorts of prestigious records along the way. First came that staggering, four-day opening in North America, when Black Panther earned around $202 million – a new high for Marvel solo movies – before collecting an additional $108 million at the domestic box office this past weekend.
Impressive though that may be, updated figures relayed by The Hollywood Reporter have revealed that Black Panther scaled even higher – all the way to $111.7 million in North America. At 45 percent, that means Ryan Coogler’s critical darling enjoyed the smallest second-weekend drop of any entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (h/t Forbes), well below The Avengers (50 percent), Iron Man (49 percent), and Thor (47 percent) in their respective second weekends of domestic release.
All eyes will now be trained on Black Panther‘s performance overseas in order to get a better reading on the film’s final cume. Russia is a notoriously difficult market to crack – particularly for Western superhero movies – while Black Panther isn’t expected to hit China until March 6th, by which point the MCU movie will be approaching its one-month anniversary on home turf.
Overall, Black Panther has racked up $708 million worldwide, and that gross will only continue to climb as the weeks roll on. Of that grand total, $403 million was brought in domestically, which tells us that Wonder Woman‘s domestic record ($413 million) is well within reach.
Barring some unforeseen hiccup, it’ll blow past Diana’s solo adventure in the next few days, and will become one of NA’s highest-grossing superhero movies ever – behind only Captain America: Civil War ($408M), Iron Man 3 ($409M), The Dark Knight Rises ($448M), Avengers: Age of Ultron ($458M), The Dark Knight ($534M) and, of course, The Avengers at $623 million.
