'Thunderbolts' Box Office: MCU's Latest Opens With Low (For Marvel) $76M Domestic and $162M Worldwide Weekend
With an opening weekend tied with 'Eternals' and below 'Captain America 4,' even good reviews and promising buzz can only take a non-event MCU movie so far.
Thunderbolts got the summer movie season off to a good enough start, earning $76 million in its domestic debut. That’s (understandably) the second-lowest MCU summer kick-off flick after Thor ($65 million) in 2011. It’s also, amid good reviews (88% fresh with a 7.1/10 average critic score on Rotten Tomatoes) and strong word-of-mouth (an A- from CinemaScore and a 4.5/5 on PostTrak), a perfectly fine 2.4x Friday-to-weekend multiplier and a 15% Thursday-to-weekend split.
90% of the domestic debut grosses came from 2-D auditoriums, with 57% from non-PLF 2-D screens. Regarding demographics, it attracted 42% white, 24% Hispanic, 18% Black, 10% Asian, and 6% Native American and “other.” It played 64% male and 69% above the age of 25. Only 10% of the PG-13, Disney-released superhero movie’s audience was under 18. Just offhand, maybe Disney should have slotted Freakier Friday in theaters for next weekend.
The picture earned $86.1 million in 52 overseas markets, including an as-expected $8.9 million in China, for a $162.1 million global launch. That softer-than-hoped overseas launch, especially with China no longer pitching in $80-$120 million on the regular, is a key concern. This isn’t the mid-2010s, when Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Ant-Man could pull a 35/65 domestic/overseas split.
Nor is this 2011, when Captain America: The First Avenger can be sold as a success with $376 million on a $140 million budget and seen as a victory merely for being a film with the word “America” in the title that earned more internationally. A movie implicitly about how the MCU is no longer an automatic A+ cinematic vacation destination (and perhaps no longer needed to save movie theaters single-handedly) is now likely to “underperform” for precisely that reason.