Related Posts
Source: USA Today
Nobody was expecting “Deadpool & Wolverine”, the latest superhero blockbuster from cinema juggernaut (no X-Men reference intended) Marvel Studios, to give up its spot at the top of the box office charts so easily, especially considering its record-breaking opening weekend and a mostly positive reception from critics and audiences. When the film opened on Friday, July 26th, it ultimately ended the three-day period with a total domestic gross $211.4 million and an overall gross of $446.5 million worldwide, more than enough to secure a #1 spot at the box office and surpass “Inside Out 2” (which also happens to have been distributed by Marvel’s parent company Disney) as having the largest opening weekend of any 2024 release. Still, an opening weekend by itself cannot determine how well a film is able to appeal to audiences in the long run, as word of mouth still needs to be favorable enough to keep viewers coming back for more. Fortunately, with a 78% approval rating from critics on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes and an A rating from audiences on CinemaScore, it appears that the general consensus on “Deadpool & Wolverine” is that it’s a solid enough blockbuster that keeps crowds pleased throughout most of its running time, and the following weekend grosses seem to support this notion. In its second weekend of release, the film earned a domestic gross of around $97 million, a decent 53% drop from the previous weekend and still enough to keep it in first place; in its third and most recent weekend of release, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is still #1 with roughly $54 million in North American ticket sales. With these totals, the film managed to cross the highly coveted billion dollar mark at the worldwide box office, and it won’t be long until it surpasses “Joker” as the highest-grossing R-rated feature of all time. What’s most surprising about this weekend, however, is that the film came surprisingly close to losing its #1 spot to a film that actually has a minor connection to its primary cinematic competition.
Opening at #2 this weekend with a domestic gross of approximately $50 million is Sony’s “It Ends With Us”, a romantic drama based on the novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover and directed by Justin Baldoni. Going into the weekend, most analysts had predicted that the film would make anywhere between $23 million and $30 million, a solid total for a film that only cost $25 million to make but not enough to surpass “Deadpool & Wolverine”. Its critical reception didn’t exactly do much to suggest that the film was strong enough to earn anything greater; Rotten Tomatoes currently shows a 59% approval rating, by no means a terrible score but not one that would imply a larger-than-expected turnout. That assumption, however, quickly changed when “It Ends With Us” secured an opening day total of $24 million, earning more in a single day than some thought it would make in three. By the weekend ended, the Baldoni-directed drama made roughly $50 million in domestic ticket sales, not quite enough to top the superhero feature that’s been box office champion for the past few weeks, but still far more than most had anticipated.
Apart from their close proximity on the box office charts, how are these two films connected? The answer lies in which actor plays the leading character in each of them; “Deadpool & Wolverine” stars Ryan Reynolds as the titular Deadpool in his fourth cinematic outing as the character (the first three being 2009’s “X-Men Origins: Wolverine”, 2016’s “Deadpool”, and the 2018 sequel “Deadpool 2”), while “It Ends With Us” stars actor Blake Lively , who previously starred on the teen television drama “Gossip Girl” and films like “A Simple Favor” before landing the lead role in a film that would earn her the biggest opening weekend of her career so far. In real life, Reynolds and Lively (who also serve as producers of their respective films) are a married couple, with the latter (and the children they share together) even making brief appearances in “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “IF”, another film released this year that stars Reynolds in a leading role. One would have to go back all the way to the year 1990 to find the last box office weekend in which a married couple starred in two different feature films that sat alongside each other at the top office box office. During a brief period in the summer of that year, Bruce Willis’ “Die Hard 2” and Demi Moore’s “Ghost” would alternate between the #1 and the #2 spots at the box office, with the latter ultimately being the higher-grossing of the two features. Willis and Moore had been married to each other at that time, so their films sharing a similar position at the box office comes across as an unusual scenario in which art (or at least the business thereof) imitates life, and it would not be until this most recent weekend that another married couple, this time Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, would achieve a similar feat.
As one might expect, there doesn’t appear to be much competitive animosity between the couple, especially considering that no matter how the weekend turned out, both films would still be deemed bona fine successes. “Deadpool & Wolverine” will soon cross the $500 million mark at the domestic box office, one of the few films to do so in a post-pandemic world, and with a current worldwide total of around $80 million, “It Ends With Us” has already turned a healthy profit and will continue to do so in the coming weeks. Whether Lively’s film will rise above Reynolds’ film during that time is not yet certain, and the competition provided by new releases (the most notable being “Alien: Romulus”, which is set to premiere in theaters across the nation on August 16th) will most likely hold both films back from either achieving or retaining a spot at the box office’s highest point. For the time being however, one can appreciate the curious rarity that is seeing two actors who are married to each other star in two separate features that just happen to be right next to each other at the top of the box office charts. While it’s certainly not impossible for something like this to ever happen it again, there’s no guarantee that it will occur any time soon, so it’s safe to say that Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively should probably appreciate this strange phenomenon while it still lasts.
