It took an R-rated action hero and a full month of attrition to knock Avengers: Endgame out of the box office’s catbird seat. John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum left nothing to chance, though.
John Wick unleashed more than just its signature brand of brutally choreographed action sequences on Endgame. It did more than charm critics not named me. (It holds an 89% “freshness” rating on Rotten Tomatoes.) It fired off all the punctuation it realistically could in its title, bombarding moviegoers with both a colon and a dash. My editor usually corrects this sort of punctuational exuberance in my writing, but moviegoers were charmed: John Wick banked a whopping $57 million in North America—far more than the $30-35 million prognosticators were originally expecting. Here’s betting they slip in a semicolon for Chapter 4. (And after this installment’s success, it seems a safe bet that there will be another John Wick film.)
With only a mere colon in its title, Avengers: Endgame slipped to second place with $29.4 million, pushing its total domestic gross to $770.8 million. That makes Marvel’s latest the second-biggest movie of all time in North America, squeezing past Avatar ($760.5 million) for the honors. Only Star Wars: The Force Awakens stands above Endgame with a $936.7-million haul.
Both Force Awakens and Endgame are distributed by Disney, by the way. And while Avatar was released by 20st Century Fox a decade ago, Disney just bought that studio, too. Seems like the Mouse House should be treating us all to discounted theme-park tickets now, doesn’t it? Endgame is also second all-time in terms of worldwide grosses, too. Its $2.6 billion trails Avatar ($2.8 billion) by less than $200 million.
Meanwhile, Detective Pikachu landed in third place with $24.8 million, zapping its total domestic haul to $94 million. And A Dog’s Journey had a rather ruff debut, retrieving $8 million—about $10 million behind where its predecessor, A Dog’s Purpose, opened just two years ago.
The Hustle closed the door on the top five and left newcomer The Sun Is Also a Star out in the cold of theatrical space, where no one could hear it weep. The latter, a teen rom-drama, fell well short of the studio’s modest expectations of $6-9 million. Instead, it banked just $2.6 million, which is about what Endgame’s villain Thanos spends on beard gel. The Sun Is Also a Star finished eighth, which suggests that the movie is also a bomb.
2000:Almost Famous
2001:Monster’s Ball
2002:Punch-Drunk Love
2003:Kill Bill
2004:Kill Bill 2
2005:Sin City/Revenge of the Sith (Tied)
2006:Pan’s Labyrinth
2007:There Will Be Blood
2008:Gran Torino/The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Tied)
2009:Avatar
2010:Miley Cyrus’s The Last Song
2011:Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
2012:Brave
2013:The Desolation of Smaug
2014:The Battle of the Five Armies
2015:The 33
2016:Silence/Hacksaw Ridge/God’s Not Dead 2 (Tied)
2017:Stephen King’s The Dark Tower
2018:Bohemian Rhapsody
2019so far: A Madea Family Funeral
I know I haven't seen Coco but here's my Pixar ranking from simply outstanding to horribly disappointing:
1. Ratatouille
2. Brave
3. Inside Out
4. Finding Dory
5. Incredibles 2
6. Cars
7. Monster's Inc.
8. Up
9. Wall-E
10. Toy Story 3
11. Cars 2
12. The Good Dinosaur
13. A Bug's Life
14. Finding Nemo
15. Monster's University
16. Toy Story 2
17. Toy Story
18. Cars 3
19. The Incredibles