By Todd Allen

5 weeks in and Avengers has gotten up to the #3 rank for both domestic and global lists, even as the Twilight fans show up to push it down to #3 for the U.S. weekend box office.

This week’s big movie debut was Snow White and and the Huntsman, which I’m going to be referring to as Snow White and Thor, since the titular Huntsman is played by Chris Hemsworth.  The Twilight fans seem to have some out in middling force for Kristen Stewart’s turn as Snow White and it came in at #1 with an estimated $56,255,000 according to Box Office Mojo. Yes, for the Twilight audience, $56 million is only moderate interest.  Men In Black 3 came in #2 with $29,300,000.  Avengers with in the #3 slot with $20,273,000.

Theater owners are sticking with the Avengers and getting rewarded.  Only down another 248 seats going into week 5, Avengers is still on 3,670 screens.  (Snow White and Thor is on 3,773 screens, so Avengers is still effectively at an opening week screen count.)  Avengers averaged $5,524 per a screen, good for third highest wide release and very good for a film going into the second month.

Avengers is sitting on $552.6M domestic/$1.355B global.  To overtake Titanic in the domestic market, it needs to take in roughly another $106M.  This week was roughly a 45% drop in box office.  If it dropped 33% each week from here on out (including weekdays), another 5 weeks would only get about $93M.  In a week or two, those theater counts are going to start dropping off more severely, so it would have to stabilize a little.  It’s possible — Hunger Games was estimated at $1.5M in it’s 11th week.  I just don’t see it happening.

On the global side of things, Avengers would need ~$830M to overtake Titanic.  Yes, it hasn’t opened in Japan yet, but it’s also “only” taken in $800M overseas.  It’s more likely to catch Titanic on the domestic chart than the global chart.

That said, it’s holding up pretty well.  With a September 25 DVD release date, you suspect they’ll want to give a little bit of time between leaving the screen and hitting store shelves.  Then again, that was probably all scheduled before anyone realized the exactly how big a hit this was going to be…

1 COMMENT

  1. After seeing Avengers once, what I’m waiting for is second run, where I expect it to have a long life pulling in $4 a head. They can postpone the DVD until next year for all I care… I’ll probably just rent it before the sequel comes out.

  2. Titanic’s gross was inflated by the 3D re-release this year, which has pulled in almost $58M. So while it’s a stretch for Avengers to catch Titanic’s full domestic gross, there’s a very good chance it will pass the original release numbers of just over $600M. And, of course, they can always follow the James Cameron model of releasing modified versions to wring out a few million more.

  3. Anyone expecting a big numbers boost from Japan should look at the past Marvel Cinematic Universe releases there. Japan represents less than 2% of the worldwide take for Thor and Iron Man, just a smidge over 2% for Iron Man 2, less than 1% of Captain America and Hulk. While it’s a big movie-watching country, it doesn’t seem to be a big Marvel-movie-watching country, relatively typing.

  5. Let’s go to the video tape…

    Japan box office for:
    Iron Man $8,658,784 (of $266M foreign totals)
    Iron Man 2 $12,831,962 (of $311.5M)
    Captain America $3,431,374 (of $192M)
    Thor $5,737,436 (of $268M)

    And for comparison, the #2 Marvel movie of all time:
    Spider-Man $56,226,136 (of $418M) (13.3%)

    Avatar $186,753,197 (of $2,021M)
    Titanic $201,389,568 (of $1,527M)
    (Avatar is #3 in Japan, after Howl’s Moving Castle.)

    The top ten movies of all time in Japan each pulled in >$14 Million the opening weekend, which would beat any previous Marvel movie take, weekly or overall.

  6. I finally got to see the Avengers on the weekend. I think I was the last in North America. I also saw MIB3 which was better.
    (ducks)
    But really, both awesome and well worth the wait to see it in a cinema containing 5 other people.