Box Office: Despite opening up against the royal wedding, Deadpool 2 finds $12m

Mediaweek editor James Manning looks at the weekend box office for May 17-20, 2018.

All it took on the weekend to boost the box office by 56% weekend-on-weekend was the magic title Deadpool 2. The film was pitched up against the Meghan and Harry royal wedding, which apart from flooding most TV channels also found a home in some cinemas. The nuptials were shown on 45 screens with an earn of $33,000. Unless those people bought up big time from the refreshment bar, it wasn’t a terribly lucrative Saturday night strategy.

The weekend take of the top 20 movies was $18.25m. Deadpool 2 was the only wide new release.

The only other better weekends since January were for the weekend launches of Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War. The global box office has been running on superheroes this year with one estimate claiming the three releases have generated a third of box office revenues so far in 2018.

#1 Deadpool 2 $12.61m

This was the second-best opening of the year behind Avengers: Infinity War, but better then Black Panther’s $10.52m and Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle’s $9.22m. The movie opened on 602 screens with a screen average of $20,963, which was the second-best this year behind only Avengers: Infinity War, which did $22,839. Deadpool 2 will need to keep up momentum to get close to the $43m earned by the original film.

#2 Avengers: Affinity War $2.35m

After four weeks the movie is now over $57m and by this time next week should rank as #3 all-time earner in Australia, behind only Avatar and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Affinity War remains on 481 screens this week, which was down 194 from the previous weekend. It had the second-best screen average in the top five with $4,903.

#3 Life Of The Party $885,000

Melissa McCarthy’s latest project dropped 56% to under $1m and remains on just under 300 screens with a screen average of $3,393 and a total to-date of $3.39m.

#4 Breath $385,000

Simon Baker’s directorial debut lingers in the top five for a third week, still holding on 242 screens at an average of $1,592. Total earn so far is $3.06m.

#5 The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society $326,000

$300,000 was enough to get in the top five this week as all the dollars flooded into Deadpool 2. However, this arthouse special spends a fifth week here with a total now just over $5.5m.

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Top photo: Julian Dennison in Deadpool 2