'Wakanda Forever' Delivers Big Opening Weekend

Theaters had high hopes for Marvel's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and the sequel didn't exactly disappoint in its debut weekend. The movie's opening weekend tickets sales were well behind those of its predecessor, but they were still strong enough to rank as the second-best opening of the year (and possibly the best when the final numbers are in). Read on for details.

Via Box Office Mojo.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has finally ended the box office blues. It will be a close call, but based on the estimates, the year’s biggest opener remains Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness with its $187 million start. Nonetheless, Wakanda Forever’s $180 million opening is a huge one, being the biggest ever for the month of November (beating the $158 million of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire), the second biggest of the year, and the 13th biggest of all time (though it could go up or down a few slots once the actuals come out). It led an overall weekend box office of $208 million, which is the fourth biggest of the year and the biggest by a long shot of the past four months, with no other weekend since July 8-10 even going above $133 million.

This isn’t the $202 million opening that we saw from Black Panther in February 2018, nor should we expect the amazing legs that were able to get that film to an astonishing $700 million. With that said, expect it to perform strong throughout the holiday season, likely repeating the five-weekend number-one streak that the first film had, and it shouldn’t have any trouble becoming the second highest grossing film of the year so far, beating the $411 million cume of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The audience response is strong, with the A CinemaScore falling below the first film’s A+ but bouncing back from the B+’s earned by Doctor Strange 2 and Thor: Love and Thunder, which ranked among the worst for the MCU. The reviews are also an improvement over the recent franchise installments, with the aforementioned films coming in at 74% and 64% respectively on Rotten Tomatoes, both at the lower end for Marvel films, while Wakanda Forever’s 84% is closer to franchise norms, though not meeting the high bar set by the first Black Panther’s 96%.

The sequel opened to $150 million internationally, which Disney reports is 4% ahead of the first film when comparing like for likes at current exchange rates. Overall, the global cume comes to $330 million. Can it become the year’s third film to make it past $1 billion worldwide despite China and Russia, which made up around $124 million of the first film’s $682 million international box office, being out of play? It may be tough, but it’s not impossible. Legging out past $500 million is plausible on the domestic front (that would be a multiplier of at least 2.7), and another $500 million abroad would be a drop of around $58 million from the original after excluding the two MIA markets. It’d be another story if audiences didn’t love the film, but the positive reception suggests that Wakanda Forever will outperform the legs on this year’s earlier MCU titles (Multiverse of Madness and Love and Thunder had multipliers of 2.2 and 2.3 respectively).

Get the rest of the story at Box Office Mojo.