Black Panther Is Officially the Highest-Grossing Superhero Movie in U.S. Box Office History

The Hollywood Reporter is writing that Disney and Marvel’s Black Panther has finally surpassed The Avengers to become the top-grossing superhero movie of all time in the North American market. (Box Office Mojo, however, hasn’t updated its rankings yet.) The Avengers grossed $623.4 million back in 2012, and Black Panther should rake in $630 million by the end of this weekend. Only seven films have ever even passed the $600 million mark in this market, so it was already in pretty rare company.

Internationally, Black Panther is still in fourth place among superhero flicks. (It says a lot about the success of this movie that “fourth-biggest superhero movie of all time” isn’t even one of its best accolades.) With a little more than $1.2 billion in box office so far, Black Panther will need until Sunday to surpass Iron Man 3‘s $1.214 billion. That will leave it in third place behind The Avengers‘ $1.5 billion and Avengers: Age of Ultron‘s $1.4 billion, but it could certainly still catch them.

We’ve written about this before in regards to Black Panther, but it bears repeating: the old Hollywood lie that “black movies don’t travel” should be well and truly dead after this box office record-breaker. Black-led movies do travel when studios put the same massive marketing and production budgets behind those movies that they do for white-led films. And the international market is just as hungry for new and interesting stories as the domestic market.

Disney and Marvel have, unsurprisingly, already confirmed a sequel for Black Panther. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said there’s “nothing specific to reveal, other than to say we absolutely will do that,” but he also added, “We have ideas and a pretty solid direction on where we want to head with the second one.” Given all the wonderful characters that director Ryan Coogler and his cast introduced in the first one, I’m excited to see where they take the sequel.

Wakanda will be back on the big screen sooner than that, though. It’s the setting for “the whole third act” in Avengers: Infinity War, which comes out on April 27, 2018.

(via The Hollywood Reporter; image: Marvel and EW)

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