Marvel’s “Black Panther” is still clawing its way into the record books. This weekend the film passed director James Cameron’s “Titanic” becoming the third highest-grossing U.S. film of all time.
“Titanic” was once king at the box office and it sat as the number one highest grossing domestic film of all time for nearly a decade. The film held onto the spot until it was surpassed by Cameron’s next blockbuster film “Avatar” ($760.5m) and both were eventually passed by Disney’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” ($936.6m), which still currently holds the number one spot in the U.S. Well there is a new cat in town and the king of Wakanda just sank “Titanic”.
On Saturday, The Ryan Coogler-directed film starring Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong’o, Michael B. Jordan and Danai Gurira finished with a domestic total of $665.3 million which easily passed “Titanic” which sits at $659.5 million. After Sundays numbers post it will have a strong hold on third place. These numbers are lifetime totals as the film had already had taken the third spot domestically by Friday if you consider initial release gross earnings.
Marvel’s ground breaking film — which has been hailed not only for Coogler’s exceptional world building and layered story but also for its virtually all-black cast of superstars — overtook Marvel’s “Avengers“ to become the biggest-selling superhero film of all time.
“Black Panther” had enough steam to pass “Titanic”, but likely won’t be able to pass “Avatar”. This is still a huge feat for the superhero flick though as “Titanic” was ranked in the top three for two decades.
The only thing that stands a chance at dethroning “Black Panther” from the third spot in the near future is the upcoming release of “Avengers Infinity War” on April 27, 2018. Experts predict that “Infinity War” will bringing between $175 million and $200 million during its first weekend, but that is still less than the $202 million “Black Panther” brought in.
“Black Panther” banked $202 million opening weekend landing fifth-place on the all-time charts. Still at this point “Black Panther” remains Marvel’s highest domestic-grossing film ever and it’s also the tenth highest movie of all time in worldwide sales with $1.29 billion globally.
If “Infinity War” does surpass “Black Panther”, you can bet some of those ticket sales will be from people there to see their new favorite actor Chadwick Boseman reprise his role as Black Panther and Avenger where the world of Wakanda has a pivotal role in the film as The Avengers try to stop Thanos from completing his set of Infinity Stones.
Including the films that would be under Disney’s banner with the recent acquisition of 21st Century Fox, Disney already owns seven of the top ten worldwide highest grossing films of all time and now with this new milestone they own all of the top three highest grossing domestic films.