‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ reverses Marvel’s box office slump

Marvel Studios, trying to move past a pair of box office humiliations, deployed two of its most popular characters over the weekend and hit a mother lode.

The potty-mouthed Deadpool and hard-drinking Wolverine — packaged together for the first time on movie screens — were on pace to sell roughly $205 million in tickets in the United States and Canada, box office analysts said Sunday. Deadpool & Wolverine will easily set a record for the largest R-rated movie opening in Hollywood history, even when adjusting for inflation. The current record-holder, Deadpool” (2016), arrived to more than $175 million in today’s dollars.

Deadpool & Wolverine was expected to collect an additional $233 million overseas, for a global total after only 3 1/2 days of play of roughly $438 million — a start on par with Marvel’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” (2022), which went on to sell about $1 billion in tickets.

Directed by Shawn Levy, Deadpool & Wolverine cost an estimated $320 million to make and market worldwide.

Marvel badly needed a win. Two of its releases last year, The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, disappointed at the box office, ending an unbroken 15-year winning streak for the boutique studio and beginning a period of intense Wall Street scrutiny. Marvel’s weakness played a role in proxy battles for Disney board seats earlier this year. (In the end, Disney fended off the activist investors, including Nelson Peltz, a founder of Trian Partners, and Ike Perlmutter, the former chair of Marvel Entertainment.)

Superheroes are not the sure things they used to be. DC Studios, part of Warner Bros. Discovery, is working on its fourth reboot strategy in eight years following disappointments like The Flash, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, and Blue Beetle. Sony has struggled with Spider-Man spinoffs like Madame Web and Morbius. The problem is that the movie and television marketplace is awash in the characters, and some of the most popular ones have already been fully exploited (at least for now).

Ticket buyers gave “Deadpool & Wolverine” an A grade in CinemaScore exit polls. About 97 per cent of fan reviews on RottenTomatoes.com, a review-aggregation site, were positive; only one Marvel movie, Spider-Man: No Way Home, has ever scored better by that measure.