The records just keep on coming for The Avengers. After obliterating even the loftiest projections last weekend when it debuted with $207.4 million, the superhero epic became the first film to ever score $100 million in its second weekend.
After a strong $29.1 million on Friday, the "Avengers" exploded 48 percent on Saturday, taking in an additional $43.1 million before rounding out the weekend with a mind-boggling $103.1 million. If that number doesn’t boggle enough, it made quick work of the existing second-weekend record of $75.6 million, previously held by James Cameron’s Avatar.
In a mere 10 days, Iron Man and co. have amassed a colossal $373.2 million (or number 18 on the all-time domestic chart) and The Avengers is the fastest film to ever reach that mark—by a lot. On Monday it will devour The Hunger Games and become the year’s top grosser.
The next question is just how high The Avengers will soar. Breaking the $500-million mark domestically is now a given, and it has a legitimate shot of hitting $600 million. Whether the Joss Whedon-directed flick has enough staying power to beat Avatar’s record of $760.5 million is another query all together.
Overseas, in a short 19 days, The Avengers cruised past the $1-billion milestone, and it still has yet to debut in some territories, including Japan. It is yet to be seen how high the worldwide number will soar, but it has outpaced Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 thus far, the film that ranks third all time.
The Top 10
But hold on, folks, there was actually a new movie that opened this weekend: Tim Burton and Johnny Depp's Dark Shadows came in a distant second, the adaptation of the gothic 1970s soap opera grossed a decent (but far from record-breaking) $28.8 million, with another $36.7 million overseas.
For what it was, Dark Shadows opened pretty much on par for what could be expected. In the world of TV-series adaptations, it virtually matched the opening of Starsky and Hutch, was up on recent entries The A-Team and Land of the Lost but down on The Dukes of Hazard and Get Smart.
Adding 151 theaters, geriatric comedy The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel stormed into the top 10 with a gross of $2.6 million and maintained a stellar per-theater average of $14,888. Expect a great run throughout the summer.
Eva Mendes-starrer Girl In Progress also managed to break the top 10 thanks to the low grosses of holdovers, collecting a decent $1.3 million in limited release.
Next weekend, three new films will challenge The Avengers, but don’t expect a new box office champ for some time at this rate. Opening on Wednesday, Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest, The Dictator, controls 2,800 theaters, while Friday Battleship will make its domestic assault in 3,750 and rom-com What to Expect When You’re Expecting will yuck it up in 3,000.
