“Wonder Woman” Shatters Glass Ceilings with the Largest Opening for a Female Director Ever
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Film | Weekend | Opening Weekend | Current Gross | |
Wonder Woman | $103.2m | $103.2m | $103.2m | |
Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie | $23.8m | $23.8m | $23.8m | |
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales | $22m | $62.9m | $115m | |
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 | $9.8m | $146.5m | $333.1m | |
Baywatch | $8.7m | $18.5m | $41.9m |
With an opening bigger than most people projected, a little over $103 million to be precise, Wonder Woman secured not only an exciting weekend for fans but the biggest opening for a female director in history, surpassing Sam Taylor-Johnson’s $93 million opening for Fifty Shades of Grey in 2015 over the four days of President’s Day weekend. It has been a glorious weekend indeed for the fans who love Wonder Woman and were excited to see a refreshing and exciting movie come out of Warner Bros. and DC’s Extended Universe, as well as for the critics who have been praising the film since seeing it over the last couple of weeks.
While it may have the lowest opening for all of the DCEU films, it opened only $13 million less than 2013’s Man of Steel and it has received a much better reception and word-of-mouth than Zack Snyder’s Superman origin film, which means it has a good chance of going further to surpass Man of Steel‘s $291 million domestic total. As it goes with blockbusters these days, it’s ultimately the number at the end — both domestically and globally — that matters, to try and reach $1 billion (or as close as you can get). But that’s getting to be a tiring goal. Wonder Woman did something amazing this weekend, beyond breaking records: it made a statement, and that will hopefully go much further than some numbers. It’s not a wonder to most people that audiences genuinely want to see female-led and directed films, but Wonder Woman has gone far to make it explicit. With a foreign intake of $125 million so far, the film is at $228 million globally and that number is only going to rise as people continue to rave and see the film for a second, third, perhaps even a fourth or fifth time because of how accomplished it and what it means to them.
What this is all means when you get down to it is that it’s going to be exciting watching Wonder Woman succeed beyond our wildest dreams over the next coming weeks.
Next up is the other newcomer for the weekend: DreamWork Animation’s Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie. Unfortunately, while this movie didn’t deliver a mediocre opening weekend, it certainly didn’t deliver anything worth writing home about. It opened to $23.8 million, which is a fair shade lower than the $25-30 million it was expected to open to, making it one of the smaller opening weekends for DreamWorks. In fact, it’s actually landed as the 25th highest opening for the company out of 36, which is fine, but certainly not great. Animated films tend to do better in the weeks following their premieres and not dropping as much as blockbusters from week-to-week, but it’s tough when the opening is already lower than desired. The only saving grace this movie has it that it has one more weekend with not much competition — and then Pixar’s Cars 3 will zoom pass it come June 16.
The rest of the weekend went more or less as expected, although Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 opened several million less than expected.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, the fifth movie in the franchise, landed in third with $22 million, bringing its domestic total to $115 million (after two weeks, including a holiday weekend). Globally, the film is now a little over $500 million, as it seems more and more unlikely that it will be able to join its brethren Dead Man’s Chest and On Stranger Tides by making it to $1 billion. After their first two weekends, those two films were at $258 million and $163 million (including a holiday weekend) domestically, respectively, which is a decent amount more than what Dead Men Tell No Tales has taken in. It’s also still the lowest film in the franchise overall with still plenty of ways to go before it even thinks of overtaking On Stranger Tides in any capacity.
Next up is Guardians 2, the second-highest film of the year so far (although still a good $150 million or so behind the number one film, Beauty and the Beast, but they’re all under the Mouse House so truly, Disney’s the real winner here). It’s now at $355 million domestically and $817 million internationally (where it’s the third-highest film of the year, behind both Beauty and the Beast and Fate of the Furious). While it’s seeming a little unlikely it will reach $1 billion, as the fifth-highest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s definitely not doing too bad for itself.
Bringing up the rear is Baywatch with second-weekend intake of $8.7 million, bringing its total to $41.9 million (and its worldwide total to $68.8 million, just under its $69 million budget). For a film that wanted to be another 21 Jump Street, it’s definitely not doing that kind of business and is, in all honesty, a bit of a dud for Paramount. For reference, by week 2 21 Jump Street had made $70 million and when all was said and done, it made $138.4 million for Sony, and that is not what Baywatch is going to end up making.
(Source: boxoffice.com, boxofficemojo.com. Figures represent numbers at time of writing, and may have changed.)
Anya Crittenton | Associate Editor