‘Black Panther’ Is $99K Away From One Last Box Office Milestone
Black people showed up and showed out!
Although it lost half of its screens this weekend and now plays in just 28 theaters, Marvel and Walt Disney’s Black Panther is slowly Spectre-ing its way to $700 million domestic. The Chadwick Boseman action drama earned around $15k last weekend to bring its domestic total to $699.901m. So, it is $99,007 away from the once-fabled $700m mark. If it sticks around long enough (and presumably gets a glorified reissue for a week or two in semi-wide release), it’ll be just the latest big movie to be dragged kicking and screaming in protest across an arbitrary box office milestone.
Spectre spent two months (61 days) hovering between $199 million to $200m. The Sony/EON/MGM 007 flick was already a solid hit, earning $881m worldwide alongside The Hunger Games: Mockingjay part II and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But be it luck or happenstance, theaters kept the 007 movie around (perhaps as an adult-skewing counterpoint to the kid-targeted Star Wars and Hunger Games sequels) for long enough to hit the $200m milestone. Sometimes it’s a matter of saving face, as the underperforming Superman Returns spent 36 days between $198m and $200m domestic before ending with just $200.7m total (and $391m worldwide on a $270m budget).
In 2013, Paramount/Viacom Inc. brought Brad Pitt’s World War Z back into theaters over the Labor Day weekend, going from 239 screens to 1,242 screens. And, sure enough, the troubled but successful zombie thriller earned $1.65 million over the four-day weekend to get over the hunch. Again, the horror drama was already a hit, having countered behind-the-scenes horror stories with a $551m global cume on a $190m budget, but Paramount wanted the sexy number for bonuses and/or post-theatrical bragging rights.
Disney put A Wrinkle in Time back into 1,984 screens over Mother’s Day weekend and then expanded just a tough back into 245 screens in mid-June (the opening weekend of Incredibles 2). Allegations of magical math notwithstanding, they got the flick over the $100m domestic mark. The Storm Reid/Oprah Winfrey fantasy didn’t magically turn into a profitable flick ($133m worldwide on a $103m budget), but it did allow for the possibility that every single 2018 Walt Disney release could end up above the $100m domestic mark (if Christopher Robin falls short, Pooh gets punched), which would be a major bragging point.
This isn’t a new thing, not by a longshot. Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. put Tim Burton’s Batman into 690 theaters in its 14th weekend to get it over the $250 million milestone. To be fair, it doesn’t always do the trick, as Disney’s Gnomeo and Juliet never did get to the $100m mark, having to settle for $99.967m. At that point, you’d think someone would just buy out a handful of theaters for a weekend. The Disney toon (not technically from Walt Disney, Pixar or DisneyToon) was already a big hit without the bragging rights. Ditto (to the 7th power) Black Panther.