Box Office: 'Black Panther' Nears $500M And Pushes Disney Over $1B For 2018

Scott Mendelson , CONTRIBUTORI cover the film industry.  Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Walt Disney

'Black Panther'

Thanks to Black Panther and holdover business from Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Coco and Thor: Ragnarok, Walt Disney has already topped the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office in just 52 days. And $491 million of that has come from Black Panther alone, as the MCU superhero flick races past $500m worldwide sometime today.

For what it’s worth, I would argue that every dime that Black Panther earns means one less dime that Solo needs to make to keep the whole market share thing in play. Yes, there is supreme irony in the African-set superhero movie potentially helping Disney save face if (and this is a big “if”) the Han Solo flick underperforms, but I’m not going to knock the studio that is releasing Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time alongside that Star Wars Story.

For those who just came for Black Panther news, the Chadwick Boseman superhero movie earned another $14.5 million in North America, which is a 30% drop from Tuesday. That brings the film’s six-day total to $277.5m. That’s the fourth-biggest six-day total ever, behind The Force Awakens ($363m), The Last Jedi ($278.7m) and Jurassic World ($277.3m). We’ll see if T’Challa can catch back up to Rey and those dinos over its second weekend. Of course, Black Panther could sink like a stone from this point onward (like Fifty Shades of Grey, for example) and still end up over/under the $458m domestic total of Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Black Panther should end its first week over/under the $291 million domestic total of Man of Steel to be the 20th-biggest comic book flick and the 20th-biggest superhero movie ever in North America (sans inflation, but give it a week or so). The question heading into its second weekend (pray for Game Night and Annihilation) is whether it drops like a normal MCU flick (around 55%) or parlays its white-hot buzz into a hold closer to Wonder Woman or Spider-Man. For what it’s worth, Deadpool dropped 57% in weekend two while even The Dark Knight took a 53% drop after its record-crushing $158m Fri-Sun frame a decade ago.

The film opens in Russia today, and thus we should see a slight uptick in the overseas box office. The film earned $14.5 million overseas for a $213.6m foreign total. So yeah, it’ll pass $500m worldwide by the end of this sentence. It opens in Japan on March 1 and China on March 9, so we’ll know in early March whether the Ryan Coogler-directed flick will have all the stars or merely most of the stars. Yes, it is possible that Black Panther ends up crossing $1 billion, but I don’t want to see any tears shed if it ends up frontloaded (or if China and Japan don’t care) to the tune of $850m.

Here’s a crazy fun question: After Lin Shaye's Insidious: The Last Key, Dakota Johnson's Fifty Shades Freed and Chadwick Boseman's Black Panther, when exactly will 2018 see its first really big hit (Maze Runner: The Death Cure is a solid line drive straight down center field) starring a white guy? Because up next are Annihilation, Jennifer Lawrence's Red Sparrow, Storm Reid's A Wrinkle in Time, Alicia Vikander's Tomb Raider, John Boyega's Pacific Rim: Uprising and then, finally, on March 29, Steven Spielberg’s Tye Sheridan-fronted Ready Player One. If that stumbles, and I’m not saying it will, it’ll be followed by Dwayne Johnson's Rampage and thus we’ll have to wait until summer’s Avengers: Infinity War to get a conventional white dude-fronted blockbuster.

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