‘Captain Marvel’ soars even higher with stellar weekend
LOS ANGELES — Captain Marvel has continued to dominate the global box office in its second weekend in theaters, leaving newcomers in the dust.
Walt Disney Studios estimated Sunday that the intergalactic superhero movie fell only 55 percent from its record-breaking opening. This weekend, Captain Marvel earned an additional $69.3 million from North American theaters and $119.7 million internationally, bringing its global grosses to $760 million.
With Brie Larson in the title role, Captain Marvel has already surpassed the lifetime grosses of a slew of superhero films including Justice League, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and The Amazing Spider-Man.
In a very distant second, Paramount’s animated family film Wonder Park struggled with $16 million against a reported $100 million budget. Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst for Comscore, said that it’s hard to compete with Captain Marvel, which is playing to all ages and audiences. But the PG-rated pic about a girl who dreams up an amusement park did not score well with critics either — it’s currently sitting at a 30 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
But it wasn’t all bad news for the films in Captain Marvel’s shadow. The Cole Sprouse and Haley Lu Richardson film Five Feet Apart opened in third place with $13.2 million in ticket sales, which is nearly double its production budget. The film from Lionsgate and CBS Films is centered on two teens with cystic fibrosis.
Audiences were overwhelmingly female, 82 percent, and young, 65 percent under age 25 and 45 percent under 18.
“You don’t always have to be No. 1 to have a success,” Dergarabedian said.
It was a good weekend overall for Lionsgate, which had three films in the top 10, including Five Feet Apart, Tyler Perry’s A Madea Family Funeral, which landed in fifth place with $8.1 million, behind How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World and the Spanish-language newcomer No Manches Frida 2, which opened on only 472 screens and grossed $3.9 million to take sixth place.