‘Black Panther’ breaks records at the box office

Believe the Hype: Black Panther sets box office records with $192 million opening weekend

Black Panther starring Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong’o, and Michael B. Jordan, surpassed box office expectations during its opening weekend.

With $192 million in ticket sales so far, the film is expected to take in $235 million over the four-day President’s Day weekend and an incredible $361 million worldwide. According to ComScore, global ticket sales were set to reach $387 million over the weekend.

According to Entertainment magazine, Black Panther is already the eighth-largest single-day gross for the film industry ever and the third-biggest opening for a superhero movie.

Black Panther scored a $75.8 million opening day. The Avengers opened with $80 million and Avengers: Age of Ultron opened with $84 million. The film also became the highest-grossing title in history at 33 AMC Theaters across the country, according to a report in the Hollywood Reporter.

“Black Panther earned more at those cinemas on Thursday evening and Friday —along with advance ticket sales for other times during the weekend — than any other movie has in an entire weekend. The number of theaters setting revenue records climbed to 80 locations, more than 10 percent of the entire circuit,” wrote Hollywood Reporter.

With that, Black Panther makes director Ryan Coogler the top-grossing Black director in film history. The previous record was held by Straight Outta Compton, which made $214 million worldwide in 2015. Marvel established the Black Panther character in the 1960s and the film features a majority African American cast and many strong female characters.

The pre-release news, nine-month-long marketing campaign and anticipation over Black Panther mixed with good reviews and the politics of the time produced a ton of buzz around the film, long before it was released.

What word of mouth will now do for the film may mean that even more records will be broken.

Lauren Victoria Burke is an independent journalist, political analyst, and contributor to the NNPA Newswire and BlackPressUSA.com. She can be contacted at LBurke007@gmail.com and on Twitter at @LVBurke.