Black Panther's run at the box office has been nothing short of amazing. With the Marvel Studios' film estimated to hit $607.4 million at the domestic box office this Sunday, the King of Wakanda is tracking towards $650 million stateside and a whopping $1.25 billion worldwide. More impressively, according to Deadline's film finance sources,
Black Panther is projected to churn a total estimated profit of $461 million after ancillaries.
Should these estimates prove accurate,
Black Panther's profits would actually be higher than the likes of
Avengers: Age of Ultron ($382.3 million) and
Captain America: Civil War ($193.4 million). That's likely due to the fact that
Black Panther features a lot of newer faces rather than Hollywood stars, like Robert Downey Jr., that command higher pay, according to the site and its sources.
"There’s not a lot of heavy participations impacting Black Panther‘s bottom line in the Robert Downey Jr. or Joss Whedon Avengers sense, nor is it at the level of a Fast & Furious cast where its top players reportedly earn $0.40 of every $1 of profit after breakeven. Note Disney did not generate these Black Panther profit estimates for us."
Black Panther ($578.3 million) is currently the second highest grossing Marvel Studios' film domestically, trailing only
Marvel's The Avengers ($623.3 million). It's 16th on the all time international charts, behind
Civil War — which it's expected to pass this weekend —
Iron Man 3, Age of Ultron, and
Marvel's The Avengers. Deadline continues:
"Our finance sources continue to be gobsmacked by the results of Black Panther‘s over-performance, especially overseas, but still emphasize that the film is largely driven by its domestic results of which African American audiences have turned out greatly (close to 40% per Screen Engine/ComScore’s PostTrak). This makes the pic an anomaly, and hard to comp in the ancillary market."
But at the end of the day, it's all about profit, which funny enough could be
Avengers: Infinity War's downfall given its cast size and marketing budget. Then again, seeing has how the Marvel blockbuster is already breaking ticket sales records, it's unlikely Disney has anything to worry about. In fact,
Infinity War actually broke a record
Black Panther set earlier this year, surpassing it as the best-selling superhero film ever in the history of pre-sales for Fandago - in just
six hours. So yea,
Infinity War will be just fine; although, it will be interesting to see how it compares profit-wise.