Box office: ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ opens with $300 million worldwide in a thriving movie market

As we cross the midpoint of the summer movie season, Marvel Studios released its second movie through Disney into 4,375 theaters as director Taika Waititi looked to recreate the magic of his 2017 release, “Thor: Ragnarok,” reuniting with Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson for Marvel’s “Thor: Love and Thunder.” Natalie Portman returned as Dr. Jane Foster, this time wielding the hammer of Thor herself, while Christian Bale portrayed the film’s main villain, Gorr the God-Butcher. A third Oscar winner, Russell Crowe, appeared as the Greek God Zeus, who sort of falls between hero and villain.

Disney released the fourth Thor movie for previews on Thursday afternoon, allowing the movie to take in $29 million in previews, which was then combined with Friday’s box office for a first-day gross of $69.5 million. Ultimately, the movie ended up opening below $150 million for the weekend with an estimated $143 million, which makes it the third-biggest opener of 2022 after Marvel’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and Universal’s “Jurassic World: Dominion.” It’s also one of five movies to open with more than $100 million this year, and it averaged $32,685 per theater, which is also pretty decent.

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Furthermore, “Love and Thor” opened with $159 million overseas, which means it’s already crossed the $300 million worldwide in a single weekend. It’s been reported that $23 million of “Thor’s” global take this weekend came from IMAX screens.

More distressingly, “Thor: Love and Thunder” received a “B+” CinemaScore, the same as Marvel’s May release, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” but also the second worst showing for a Marvel movie on the audience polling site. (Oddly, the very first “Thor” also received a “B+” on CinemaScore 11 years ago.) Although “Love and Thunder” only received a 68% Fresh from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, audiences seemed to like it more, with 81% giving it a positive score.

Universal’s animated sequel “Minions: The Rise of Gru” dropped to second place with $45.55 million, down 57% from its fantastic opening weekend over the 4th of July holiday. “Minions” has already grossed $210 million in North America, and it doesn’t seem like $300 million is completely out of range despite having lots of family competition in the coming weeks.

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Tom Cruise’s “Top Gun: Maverick” had one of its biggest hits since being released in May, dropping 40% to third place with an estimated $15.5 million. That brought it up to $597.4 million domestic, which means that sometime either on Monday or Tuesday, it will only be the 12th movie ever to make $600 million domestically. It continues to do similarly well overseas, where it added another $23 million this weekend to bring its global cume to $1.18 billion.

Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” came in fourth with $11 million, down 40% from last weekend, bringing its domestic gross to $91.1 million, a good sign that the movie will become Luhrmann’s second movie to make $100 million domestically after 2013’s “The Great Gatsby.” It has made another $64 million overseas for a total worldwide take of $155.1 million so far.

Fifth place went to Universal’s “Jurassic World: Dominion,” which dropped 49% with $8.4 million over the weekend, as it crossed the $350 million mark after five weeks in North American theaters.

The Universal horror film “The Black Phone,” starring Ethan Hawke, took sixth place with $7.7 million, a decent 37%, which despite it losing almost 600 theaters on Friday, was still one of the smaller weekend drop-offs.

Disney-Pixar’s “Lightyear” took seventh place with $2.9 million, which is down 55% from the 4th of July weekend. It has grossed $112.3 million so far, but after losing 1,710 theaters on Friday, it’s unlikely to be in the top 10 for very long. It’s grossed another $92.2 million overseas, so its global total is $204.5 million.

A24 has slowly been rolling “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” out to more theaters before its wide release on July 15. This weekend, it took in roughly $340,000 in 48 theaters, a slight uptick from last weekend but enough to get it into the top 10 in eighth place with just below a million grossed so far. In fact, last week’s “Mr. Malcolm’s List” released by Bleecker Street took such a big hit in its second weekend that it dropped 70% and ended up below “Marcel” in tenth place.

As far as the Gold Derby box office prediction game, the majority of players had “Love and Thunder” winning the weekend, but about 2/3rds of the players had it opening with more than $150 million. The consensus of players also got the rest of the top 5 correct, so there’s likely to be about 56 players going 6 for 6. Four players received a perfect score for the 4th of July weekend with “paulhardister” coming out ahead by scoring 52,113 points while doing so.

On Friday, a few lower-profile movies open against the summer blockbusters including Sony’s “Where the Crawdads Sing” and Paramount/Nickelodeon’s animated film, “Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank.” You can get some idea how they might fare with Gold Derby’s box office preview on Wednesday.