All Hail King T’Challa! ‘Black Panther’ broke into theatres this weekend like a freight train and began to break records left and right. The film managed to bring in over $201 million over the standard weekend and that total ballooned to over $242 million when you include the President’s Day numbers. While most people expected the film to bring in big-time money over the weekend, few had the audacity to predict numbers like this.
The film is set to reign supreme at the box office for the foreseeable future and has completely taken the wind out of any film’s sails that hoped they could find sleeper success in the month of February. The films first real challenger will appear in mid-March when Tomb Raider is released, though even that film may not be able to challenge ‘Black Panther’ for the top spot. Although, shortly after Tomb Raider hit’s theatres ‘Black Panther’ will be hit by a one-two punch of ‘Ready Player One’ and ‘Pacific Rim: Uprising‘ which will more than likely unseat ‘Black Panther’ if ‘Tomb Raider‘ hasn’t already.
Furthermore, the early success of ‘Black Panther’ is leading me to believe that we might have a billion dollar movie on our hands. There have only been 32 billion dollar films in the history of cinema and if the film can even marginally keep up this pace it looks as if we might easily have the thirty-third member of the $1 billion club.
