Nearly six months after its initial release, Marvel Studios’ Black Panther has crossed yet another major milestone at the domestic box office.
As of today, Black Panther is now only the third film (ever) to cross $700 million at the domestic box office — not adjusted for inflation — joining only Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($936.7 million) and Avatar ($760.5 million). The feat was achieved after Disney and Marvel slowly began to increase the amount of theaters showing the film still in order to try and surpass the milestone without holding a limited theatrical re-release to do so.
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To date, Black Panther has amassed $1.346 billion at the worldwide box office since its initial release back in February. While that puts the film behind Avengers: Infinity War at the global box office, as that film is currently sitting at $2.04 billion worldwide, it’s well ahead of the latest Avengers film domestically. As it stands, Infinity War, which just hit digital last week, is at $677 million domestically, and at this rate, it seems highly unlikely that it’ll top Black Panther once it finishes its run.
The film is also one of four films to hit $1 billion at the box office this year, joining Infinity War, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom ($1.240 billion), and Incredibles 2 ($1.002 billion).
As it stands, an official sequel has not yet been announced, although Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has confirmed it’ll happen, with the hope that Ryan Coogler will return to helm the feature. At the time, Feige told reporters that the studio had “ideas” of where it could take a follow-up. “One of the favorite pastimes at Marvel Studios is sitting around on a Part One and talking and dreaming about what we would do in a Part Two. There have been plenty of those conversations as we were putting together the first Black Panther. We have ideas and a pretty solid direction on where we want to head with the second one.”
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Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther stars Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa/Black Panther, Michael B. Jordan as N’Jadaka/Erik “Killmonger” Stevens, Lupita Nyong’o as Nakia, Danai Gurira as Okoye, Forest Whitaker as Zuri and Andy Serkis as Ulysses Klaue. It is currently available on digital, Blu-ray and DVD.
(via The Hollywood Reporter)