Black Adam’s $62.2 million domestic opening weekend makes it the first 2022 film to exceed $50 million since Thor: Love and Thunder.
Black Adam is expected to bring in an opening weekend of more than $50 million, the first film in 2022 to do so since July. The DCEU project, which opened this weekend on October 21, is re-teaming Jungle Cruise star Dwayne Johnson with director Jaume Collet-Serra. Johnson stars as the titular antihero, a former slave from Khandaq who gains divine powers before being imprisoned for 5,000 years. When he is finally released into the modern era, the Justice Society of America, which includes Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), and Atom Smasher (Luke Centineo), tries to teach him how to be a true hero.
Certain pundits were concerned that the film would not perform well at the box office, given that it suffered a critical beating and delivered the worst Rotten Tomatoes score for the franchise since 2017. Justice League. However, the audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes and other aggregator platforms reflects a huge divide between critics and viewers. This probably led to Black Adam‘s solid opening night, which was the best for the franchise since Aquarius debuted in 2018.
Per Variety, Black Adam is projected to close out the weekend with an opening 3-day gross of $62.2 million. While the box office has seen a resurgence in October, with the slasher franchise finale Halloween Ends With opening gross of $40.1 million last weekend, it marks the first time a movie has opened more than $50 million in domestic theaters since this summer. The last project to achieve this goal was a rival superhero movie: Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunderwhich opened on July 8.
How does Black Adam compare to other DCEU movies?
This opening weekend has more than surpassed it Black Adam2021’s immediate predecessors, the pandemic-era releases The Suicide Squad ($26.2 million) and 2020 Wonder Woman 1984 ($16.7 million). However, the opening revenues of both releases were affected by a simultaneous home streaming release on HBO Max. By taking that out of the equation, Black Adam still competes well with pre-pandemic opening weekends for Birds of prey ($33 million) and Shazam! ($53.5 million), the film that Black Adam is split off directly from.
As with opening night, it’s not until you look back as far as Aquariusopening weekend of $67.8 million in 2018 that Black Adam is surpassed. That movie is still the highest-grossing DCEU project with a worldwide gross of $1.15 billion, so the Johnson vehicle is in very good company. It remains to be seen if the project can maintain its current momentum, but with the tentpole’s next major release coming soon Black Panther: Wakanda Forever hits theaters on November 11, the film has a chance to build a strong box office takeover in the coming weeks.
Source: Variety
