‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Has Biggest R-Rated Opening Weekend Ever

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…

1. Deadpool & Wolverine – $205.0 million
2. Twisters – $35.3 million
3. Despicable Me 4 – $14.2 million
4. Inside Out 2 – $8.3 million
5. Longlegs – $6.7 million
6. A Quiet Place: Day One – $3.0 million
7. Bad Boys: Ride or Die – $1.2 million
8. The Fabulous Four – $1.0 million
9. Fly Me to the Moon – $0.7 million
10. 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.