Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier set an April box office record on Friday as Captain America, Falcon and Black Widow drew huge crowds. It laid waste to the holdover competition including Divergent and Noah without breaking a sweat.
Captain America’s second solo outing plays more like The Avengers with a larger scope and more Marvel characters. The result was a $37 million opening on Friday that set an April box office record in North America and blew away the $25.7 million that Captain America: The First Avenger debuted with several years ago, and topped the $31.9 million opening weekend for the previous Marvel film Thor: The Dark World.
The Winter Soldier is playing in the same league as other Marvel heavyweights including Iron Man 3 and The Avengers. It should finish its opening weekend somewhere in the neighborhood of $95-100 million, numbers Disney and Marvel will be more than glad to book.
Last week’s champ Noah sprung a leak and dropped a massive 68% in its second Friday of release. With $4.9 million on Friday, the Darren Aronofsky Biblical epic starring Russell Crowe has reached $111.3 million worldwide thus far.
Divergent continues its steep decline with $4.2 million on Friday, a 49 percent fall from the previous Friday. Lionsgate and Summit Entertainment must still be thrilled with the $105.2 million tally thus far as the sequel has already been green lit.
God’s Not Dead took fourth place on Friday with $2.2 million after adding 1,758 locations. Fifth went to Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, which brought in $1.83 million Friday. It has now earned $28.9 million and has yet to play at over 1,300 locations.
Stop back Sunday for the complete weekend box office studio estimates to see whether Captain America was able to ascend to the magical $100 million mark in three days.
