Wonder Woman exceeded all expectations this weekend, delivering an impressive $100 million opening, the largest opening for a female-directed feature, vastly out-performing the previous record holder Fifty Shades of Grey, which debuted with $85.1 million back in 2015. Meanwhile, Fox's release of the DreamWorks Animation feature Captain Underpants came up a little short of Mojo's forecast while mildly outperforming the studio's modest expectations. Overall, the weekend dramatically outperformed the post-holiday weekend from 2016 by a massive 38% as the top twelve delivered a combined $176 million.
At the top, Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins and starring Gal Gadot in the title role, went into the weekend boasting the best reviews out of the four films that have been released in the DC Extended Universe so far and the critical opinion definitely aided the film's awareness as the buzz only continued to grow throughout the week. Following an impressive $38.76 million Friday that buzz was no longer due to critics as audiences gave the film an "A" CinemaScore, pushing the film over $100 million for its opening weekend, the first female directed feature to achieve such an opening. And as far as female-led comic book adaptations are concerned, it's by far the largest opening as the second closest is Paramount's Ghost in the Shell, which debuted with $18.6 million earlier this year.
In fact, Wonder Woman delivered the 16th largest opening weekend for a comic book adaptation all-time. It's the sixth largest opening among that group if you don't count sequels and, based on estimates, the sixth largest June opening all-time. Looking ahead, given the strong word of mouth, it would be no shock to see it deliver $300 million domestically or at least very close to that figure.
Beyond the CinemaScore, the film played to an audience that was 52% female vs. 48% male, 14% of the audience was under the age of 18 and 47% was over the age of 35.
Internationally, the performance was equally strong, as Wonder Woman brought in an estimated $122.5 million from 55 markets, which includes a $38 million debut in China, bettering the openings for the likes of Man of Steel, Thor, The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy. Additional openings include the UK ($7.5m), Mexico ($8.4m), South Korea ($8.5m), Brazil ($8.3m), Australia ($4.9m), Russia ($4.8m) and Indonesia ($4.7m). Still to come are openings in France next week, Germany on June 15, Spain on June 23 and the film opens in Japan in August.
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Glad to see others went to the box office this past weekend as well. Shows fatigue doesn't exist for fun, well made blockbusters even in a saturated market.
