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John Wick Ends Endgame’s No. 1 Run

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.