Fox is certainly celebrating this week, as they follow up the massive success of last year’s Deadpool with another R-rated smash-hit superhero flick: Logan. The final outing for Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine hit theaters last week, and saw a phenomenal first weekend at the box office – it raked in $85.3 million in the first three days, breaking records for an R-rated March release.
Logan has the fourth-highest opening weekend of the franchise (behind Deadpool, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and X-Men: The Last Stand). The film is also a hit with the critics, and currently sits at 92 percent on aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes – the highest of any of the X-Men franchise. Now, it looks like Logan is set to cross a new box-office milestone, continuing its absolutely phenomenal first week.
The film is due to pass $100 million today, according to a Deadline report, after a Monday take of $7.15 million. At the start of today, Logan was sitting at a cool $95.55 million cumulative take, leaving the film with less than $5 million to go before crossing the century mark.
There’s little doubt that Logan will hit this mark, as the majority of new releases see a dip in sales on the Monday after opening weekend, followed by a rise again on Tuesdays. This is due to the tendency for theaters to run discounts and special offers on a Tuesday (which would otherwise be a very slow day for ticket sales). In addition, this week sees 19 percent of colleges on break, freeing up a significant number of student-aged movie-goers to take advantage of those Tuesday movie deals.
It’s fantastic to see Logan doing so well, both in terms of ticket sales and critical response. As well as breaking box office records and becoming one of the most successful X-Men movies yet, Logan is also a film with a (comparatively) small budget of only $97 million, putting it comfortably into the black in under a week. This proves that the success of Deadpool as an R-rated superhero film was not a one-off, and sets the stage for future adult-oriented superhero movies to do just as well.
Of course, this success doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Logan garnered an enormous amount of pre-release hype, and was projected to hit huge box office numbers from the start. It would have been far more surprising if the film didn’t rake in huge ticket sales on its opening weekend, although the positive critical response was not guaranteed (and we’ve seen plenty of films that succeed commercially but not critically). Despite this being a predictable success, it’s still thrilling to see it, and hopefully it shows that Fox has finally found the right angle for future X-Men stories.
Next: Was Logan a Fitting End for Patrick Stewart’s Professor X?
Source: Deadline
- Wolverine 3 Release Date: 2017-03-03
