Deadpool & Wolverine had the biggest opening weekend for an R-rated movie ever.
That’s the biggest and most important takeaway, as the film debuted with a massive $205 million in domestic ticket sales. In addition to being the biggest R-rated debut ever, that’s also the eighth-biggest opening weekend ever for a film of any rating, just behind the original Avengers $207 million from 2012. Deadpool & Wolverine is also the ninth film in history to make $200 million in its opening weekend.
For point of comparison, the original Deadpool grossed $132 million in its opening weekend in 2016. Deadpool 2 opened to $125 million in 2018. So the addition of Hugh Jackman and the promise of tons of Marvel Cinematic Universe elements (and big cameos) added roughly $80 million of appeal for that opening weekend.
In terms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Deadpool & Wolverine had the fifth biggest opening ever, behind Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Avengers: Infinity War, and The Avengers.
READ MORE: The Next Avengers Movie Is Avengers: Doomsday, Starring Robert Downey Jr.
Here is the full (estimated) box office chart. Theaters had a good weekend overall, not just with Deadpool & Wolverine…
- Deadpool & Wolverine – $205.0 million
- Twisters – $35.3 million
- Despicable Me 4 – $14.2 million
- Inside Out 2 – $8.3 million
- Longlegs – $6.7 million
- A Quiet Place: Day One – $3.0 million
- Bad Boys: Ride or Die – $1.2 million
- The Fabulous Four – $1.0 million
- Fly Me to the Moon – $0.7 million
- MaXXXine – $0.2 million
The last few years so many stories have been written about how Marvel has fallen on hard times; that they’d lost their magic touch, that the’d diluted themselves; that their best days were behind them. And in a stretch of 72 hours they had one of their biggest openings ever, the biggest R-rated opening ever, and they announced that they were bringing back their biggest star ever to appear in two new Avengers movies as Marvel’s biggest villain ever. Sooooo I don’t think we’re going to see too many more articles like that any time soon.
The next Marvel film after Deadpool & Wolverine, Captain America: Brave New World, is scheduled to open in theaters on February 14, 2025.
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