Black Panther not backing down
No one will ever underestimate King T’Challa of Wakanda again.
Black Panther, proving its $200-million opening weekend was no fluke, eclipsed $112 million over its second, trailing only Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens as the largest second weekend of all time, according to data from measurement and analytics firm ComScore.
Directed by Ryan Coogler, and starring Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan and Lupita Nyong’o, Marvel Studios’ latest superhero epic continued to monopolize the domestic box office, easily sweeping aside the week’s newcomers — Game Night, Annihilation and Every Day — its three-day total accounting for more than 50 percent of the weekend’s gross.
Black Panther’s $403-million North American total already makes it the highest grossing February film ever. Internationally, the Disney release tallied $83.8 million to bring its worldwide total to $704 million.
A distant second, Game Night, Warner Bros. actioncomedy starring Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, debuted with $17 million, apace with analysts’ projections but higher than the studio’s reported expectations.
Despite The Times’ Justin Chang’s assessment of Game Night as a tediously overworked suburban-noir farce, it satisfied most critics, netting 81 percent fresh on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, while scoring a B+ with audiences per the polling firm Cinemascore.
Holdover Peter Rabbit, Columbia’s hybrid live-action/animation adaptation of the Beatrix Potter children’s classic, held on to third place with about $13 million in its third weekend. Its modest 28 percent drop, reflecting it being the primary option for families with young children, brings its total to $71.5 million.
In fourth place, British writer-director Alex Garland’s sci-fi thriller Annihilation, his first film since the critically acclaimed Ex Machina in 2014, earned $11 million. The film stars Natalie Portman as a biologist on a mission with an all-female team in a toxically mutated region of the United States that Chang called a mind-bending foray into the unknown. The cerebrally challenging movie received only a C on Cinemascore, but pleased critics, with an 87 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
Rounding out the top five was Fifty Shades Freed at $7.1 million, also in its third weekend. The wind-up of the erotic romance trilogy, starring Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan, has about $90 million total. The previous two installments, 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey and 2017’s Fifty Shades Darker finished at $166.2 million and $114.6 million, respectively.
Also opening this weekend was the Orion/MGM teen fantasy Every Day, which debuted with sales of $3 million. It’s the first picture MGM has distributed in wide release in years, using its revived Orion brand for small budget features. The producer of the James Bond movies has been rebuilding its distribution capability since emerging from bankruptcy in 2010.
Every Day is based on a New York Times best-seller about a teenage girl who falls in love with a person who inhabits a different body every day. The film cost $5 million to make, according to the studio.