Two weeks ago there were reports that the upcoming Deadpool & Wolverine was headed for a $200 million+ opening weekend. Extraordinary even by pre-pandemic standards those numbers caused a lot of excitement in the press.
Naturally I looked forward to the first estimate from Boxoffice Pro with more than the usual interest. Would those early estimates prove to have been exaggerated by the enthusiasm of devoted fans who distorted the earlier tracking, or indicative of very strong interest in the movie being so widespread as the tracking claimed?
As it happened Boxoffice Pro's estimate, if not quite as ebullient as the $200-$239 million so recently circulated, comes pretty close--their estimate some $175-$200 million, so that, yes, this will probably be the year's biggest opening up to at least that point. Meanwhile, going by a not unreasonable multiplier of 5-6 for the final global gross, the $1 billion mark definitely within reach, and the movie likely end up the franchise's biggest earner not just in current dollars but real terms as well.
I am sure many expected this all along--even if this could hardly have been extrapolated from the hard commercial data of the movie's predecessors, and the state of the market in 2023-2024. After all, the second Deadpool film made less than the first, all as the X-Men franchise is itself far along a path of diminishing returns with its second adaptation of the Dark Phoenix saga, all as superhero movies especially and franchise spectacles like these generally have been falling flat with audiences, etc., etc.--all of which led me just a few months ago to suggest the film's possibly failing to hit the half billion dollar mark (and even in April saw the "realistic" ceiling for the film as about $700 million).
Still, if in the past year or so my use of extrapolations from how prior films in a series and other similar films have done have tended to produce overestimates of the grosses of major films--as it did The Flash, and Indiana Jones 5, and Mission: Impossible 7, and Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman 2, this may be a case of the extrapolative approach producing a significant underestimation, and in a very welcome way from the standpoint not just of fans of Deadpool and Wolverine and the superhero genre, but Marvel, Disney and the American film industry as their claqueurs in the entertainment press will surely let us know should the box office bear out these expectations.
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