Marvel’s latest offering Thunderbolts* is on track to top the weekend box office rankings after making $31.5m (£24m) across Friday and preview screenings from more than 4,000 US cinemas.
The successful release day puts the film, about a misfit squad of Marvel’s antiheroes, in a position to meet projections for a domestic opening weekend between $70m and $75m (£57m).
However, this will still rank the film as drawing one of the lower Marvel openings in history. It is likely to gross less than Disney’s previous Marvel outing, Captain America: Brave New World, which was released in February and had a successful $40.9m (£30m) opening day and made $88m (£66m) over the weekend.
The new release is also likely to stay behind 2021’s Black Widow, which introduced Thunderbolts* stars Florence Pugh and David Harbour, and made $80m (£60m) in its opening weekend.
The film also stars Marvel regular Sebastian Stan, as well as Wyatt Russell, Hannah John-Kamen, Lewis Pullman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. It has received mostly positive reviews, with The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey calling it “the best Marvel movie in years” in a four-star review.
Loughrey praised the formula of bringing together a group of squabbling antiheroes, writing: “Take a crew of emotionally repressed characters and have them gradually and tenderly open up and you’ve found a shortcut to drawing in and disarming your audience.”
Variety reports that the film had a production cost of $180m, plus another $100m to market and distribute, meaning that it needs to have significant staying power to make a profit from its cinema rollout.
Elsewhere at the US box office, Ryan Coogler’s vampire horror Sinners had another successful weekend, making $9.5m on Friday, down just 27 per cent from its daily total a week ago.
The film stars Michael B Jordan in dual roles, playing twin brothers who return from Chicago to their hometown in 1930s Mississippi. It recently made history as the first horror film to receive an A rating by the viewer polling company CinemaScore.
It has also shown impressive staying power at the box office since debuting two weeks ago, and has already tripled its $48m opening weekend.
In third place at the US box office on Friday was A Minecraft Movie, which is still drawing in large crowds on its fifth weekend of release. The video game adaptation film, starring Jack Black, Jason Momoa and Danielle Brooks, earned another $3.1m on Friday, making its total domestic gross $387.6m (£291m).
In the coming days, it is expected to surpass a $400m (£301m) domestic gross and become one top 50 movies of all time at the US box office.
The film’s popularity has also led to rowdy scenes in cinemas, with multiple cinema chains in the UK reporting disturbances during screenings, primarily involving young audiences partaking in TikTok trends that involve shouting back phrases from internet memes to the screen.
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