Deadpool Wins, It Ends With Us Opens to $50 Million

Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds managed to create their own Barbenheimer moment at the box office with their two very different films, Deadpool and Wolverine And It ends with us.

Marvel Studios and Disney Deadpool and Wolverine In addition to crossing the $1 billion mark at the global box office on Saturday, the film held on to the top spot in North America with $54.2 million in its third weekend. The blockbuster, which has been breaking one record after another, finished Sunday with an estimated $494.3 million domestically and $535.2 million overseas, for a global total of $1.029 billion.

The film is a huge win for Marvel, and there’s still a lot more to come. The film is just days away from passing Warner Bros. Joker to become the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time at the worldwide box office (a record it already holds domestically).

The new female-powered Sony It ends with usstarring and produced by Lively, came in second with an estimated $50 million, well above most expectations.

The film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel was on track to gross $23 million at the box office, even though exhibitors were expecting a $40 million gross based on advance sales. The film’s performance, bolstered by an A-CinemaScore and a 95% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, underscores the strong demand for a film aimed at women.

The combination of these two films is a big win for the August box office, with overall domestic grosses expected to be up 35% from the same weekend last year, and more remarkably, up 19% from 2019, the last year before the pandemic. Additionally, this is the first time that two consecutive August films have grossed $50 million or more.

Ticket buyers for It ends with us 84% of the channel’s members are women, spread across all adult age groups; 60% are between 18 and 34, while 33% are 35 and over. It also has the notable advantage of appealing to an ethnically diverse audience.

It ends with us Actress Lively stars as Lily Bloom, a woman who overcomes a traumatic childhood to embark on a new life in Boston and fulfill her lifelong dream of opening her own business. A chance encounter with charming neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni) sparks an intense connection, but as they fall deeply in love, Lily begins to see sides of Ryle that remind her of her parents’ relationship. When Lily’s first love, Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), suddenly reappears in her life, her relationship with Ryle is upended and Lily realizes she must learn to rely on her own strength to make an impossible choice about her future.

This is the first Hoover novel to be adapted for the big screen. The film is directed by Baldoni and cost a modest $25 million to produce before it was released commercially.

Some have billed the Reynolds-Lively duel films as a showdown, but it’s quite the opposite, according to insiders. Reynolds, a marketing specialist…