2009 May 04. 19:39

Box Office Guru Wrapup: Wolverine Has Huge $87M Opening

The X-Men spin-off opens blockbuster season with a bang.

Fox's super hero spinoff X-Men Origins: Wolverine crushed the competition and ruled the global box office kicking off the summer movie season with a scorching debut.

The romantic comedy Ghosts of Girlfriends Past opened reasonably well in second place helping the overall marketplace match the same weekend a year ago when Iron Man got 2008's record summer season started.

Wolverine generated a ferocious opening weekend grossing an estimated $87M over the Friday-to-Sunday period from a studio record 4,099 theaters for a sizzling $21,225 average. Starring Hugh Jackman who also produced, the PG-13 prequel tells the origin story of the popular X-Men character and successfully launched a new series of spinoffs for a decade-old franchise that previously grossed $606.6M domestically across its last three installments.

The opening ranked as the eleventh best for May, the strongest month of the year when it comes to debuts. However it was the fourth largest when looking at the first weekend of May when the summer movie season traditionally kicks off. Only fellow comic book pics Spider-Man 3 ($151.1M in 2007), Spider-Man ($114.8M in 2002), and Iron Man ($98.6M) have fared better. The Wolverine bow is also the third largest in studio history for Fox trailing Star Wars Episode III ($108.4M) and X-Men: The Last Stand ($102.8M).

Directed by Gavin Hood (Tsotsi), Wolverine got off to a muscular start with $35M in ticket sales on Friday. Saturday dropped by 15% to $29.8M while Sunday is estimated to fall by 25% to $22.3M. During their opening weekends, Saturday-to-Sunday declines were 30% for Iron Man and 22% for Spider-Man 3. The audience for the new tale was 53% male and 52% over 25.

A pirated copy of Wolverine surfaced online a month ago and may have had an impact on sales this weekend. Although there has been much speculation, no hard data exists pinpointing how much in ticket sales was lost. The source of the leaked early copy has not been found.

Looking at past summer kickoff films, the Origins opening weekend gross most resembled the $85.6M of X2: X-Men United from 2003, although ticket prices have risen by 21% since that year. By comparing admissions, Wolverine sold about as many tickets as 2001's The Mummy Returns which debuted to $68.1M which translates to roughly $88M at today's ticket prices. Both sold about 12 million stubs in their first three days.

Still, for an X-Men movie stripped of popular characters like Storm, Magneto, Professor X, and Rogue, Wolverine managed to stand on its own two feet and pull in numbers in line with franchise history. But without so many expensive actors demanding raises with each new installment, the cost was lower this time - $130M after tax credits from shooting in Australia are factored in. The first three mutant films were all shot in Canada with the initial installment opening to $54.5M in July of 2000. Last Stand carried a hefty reported price tag of $210M.

Fox and Marvel are developing an origin film for Magneto which is planned for a 2011 release. That same year, the comic book giant also aims to release the big screen adventures Captain America and Thor through Paramount and Spider-Man 4 through Sony.

Wolverine had sharp claws overseas too with a spectacular day and date launch that pulled in an additional $73M from over 9,000 screens in 101 markets making for a colossal $160M opening around the world. Next weekend, grosses are expected to drop sharply as Paramount invades theaters globally with its highly-anticipated sci-fi origin tale Star Trek.

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