As you may have heard yesterday, Fandango is reporting that Black Panther broke a record for the biggest first-day pre-sales ever for an MCU title, with more tickets sold online for the film’s first few days in domestic release. I don’t have the exact breakdown, but I’m going to assume that most folks who flooded the website on Tuesday didn’t buy advance tickets for Monday morning at 11:30 am. Now the good news is that this will increase anticipation for Ryan Coogler’s action fantasy, opening courtesy of Walt Disney on Feb. 15, 2018. The bad news, to the extent that this is in any way “bad,” is that we may be seeing folks who see that stat then argue that Black Panther is surely heading toward a debut larger than Captain America: Civil War‘s $179m opening in the summer of 2016.
Now, for the record, with hype running high, the expectation that it will be a thrilling bit of popcorn cinema and obvious interest among black/African-American audiences and general MCU goodwill, it is entirely possible that the Chadwick Boseman/Michael B. Jordan/Lupita Nyong’o/Danai Gurira/Angela Bassett/Forest Whitaker/Daniel Kaluuya/Sterling K. Brown “MCU meets 007” spectacular will, well, Deadpool snagged a $132 million Fri-Sun/$152m Fri-Mon debut on Presidents Day weekend two years ago. But we also don’t want to create a situation where hopes are so high that a rock-solid MCU debut (think the $85-$95m openings for Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy and Doctor Strange) would be considered disappointing.
For more details: forbes.com
