Guardians of the Galaxy 3's Fourth Weekend at the Box Office: How Did it Do?

The weekend numbers are a little slower than usual coming in on a four-day holiday weekend, but we do have them now.

As of Sunday Guardians of the Galaxy 3 had taken in $299 million domestically, with the film's breaking $300 million today reasonably assumed--and thus has already surpassed the bottom end of the range specified in pre-release expectations (to say nothing of the "doomsday" scenarios of an Ant-Man 3-like collapse), with some way still to go. More or less consistent with my projections of recent weeks, should the week-to-week trend hold I still expect the movie will finish up somewhere around $330 million in North America.

That said, with the film's global take standing at $731 million, it seems there is a quicker decline in the film's take overseas, reflecting the more front-loaded character of the international gross as compared with the weaker opening but better holds seen in North America. (The opening weekend saw the movie take in less than 42 percent of its money domestically--$118 million of the global $228 million; this past week saw it take perhaps 45 percent of its money there--$32.5 million of the $72 million or so.) How much that international take slows remains to be seen, but going by its week-to-week declines over the past two weeks (from $146 million to $78 million, from $78 million to $39 million), I can picture another $40 million+ coming in from abroad. Working out to $470 million+ internationally, and $330 million domestic, a final worldwide tally at least in the vicinity of $800 million very probable, and a gross some way north of that fairly so, with a figure of somewhere around $825 million not too hard to picture (if with perhaps a little more coming from North America, a little less from elsewhere).

Again, this is better than what many feared given the unhappy precedents of the last three Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films (and that opening weekend), but confirms the film-to-film declines of the MCU franchise's various series for the time being. That still leaves the franchise profitable for now, and likely to remain profitable even were it to go on falling some way--but rather less so than at its Phase Three peak, with the trend untoward, and complacency on the part of the franchise-runners unwarranted.