Breaking: AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR smashes opening weekend box office records

Yesterday, the news broke that Avengers: Infinity War was on track to potentially exceed the previous record-breaking domestic opening weekend set by Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and now it’s official. The Force Awakens opened in 2016 to a weekend total of $248 million and Infinity War has bested that total by $10 million, with a domestic weekend box office of $258 million.

Or another way to look at it: A Disney movie overtakes another Disney movie for the top spot on list of mostly Disney movies. The top ten domestic openings are dominated by Disney movies, with Universal’s Jurassic World being the only outlier according to the data available on boxofficemojo.com:

1. Avengers: Infinity War
2. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
3. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
4. Jurassic World
5. Marvel’s The Avengers
6. Black Panther
7. Avengers: Age of Ultron
8. Captain America: Civil War
9. Beauty and the Beast
10. Iron Man 3

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of legs Infinity War has in weekends to come – sorting by total domestic gross rather than opening weekend, Black Panther is the success story of the year with the third-ranking domestic gross total of more than $688 million, behind The Force Awakens and Avatar. Black Panther was very well received critically (it sits at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes), so it stands to reason that the positive word of mouth elevated its overall rank relative to opening weekend totals:

1. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
2. Avatar
3. Black Panther
4. Titanic
5. Jurassic World
6. Marvel’s The Avengers
7. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
8. The Dark Knight
9. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
10. Beauty and the Beast

Another factor at work to these scores is the number of screens the movie opens on, which is presumably impacted by a number of factors, including expectations and time of year/competition. Infinity War opened in 4,474 theater in the U.S., a higher number than the other top 9 domestic opening weekend films on the list.