Box Office: Iron Man 3 Starts The Summer Strong With $68.3 Million Friday

Box Office, News

Disney/Marvel laid down the challenge for the rest of the summer tentpole slate. And that challenge is simply this: Beat me if you can. Dropping into 4,253 theaters on Friday, plus appearing on thousands of screens midnight and earlier the night before, Iron Man 3 kickstarted the summer with $68.3 million from Friday, and an estimated $64 million from Saturday. If it continues to have a small drop of from Saturday to Sunday it could have a domestic weekend that has it become the second-biggest three-day opening ever (surpassing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 take of $169.2M). But Iron Man 3 would still trail The Avengers and its $207.4M opening last year. That film looks to hold firm with the #1 ranking for the foreseeable future until perhaps 2015 rolls around and The Avengers 2 arrives. IM3’s worldwide cume expected through Sunday is $650M.

To put the opening of Iron Man 3 in perspective for the start of the summer (the first weekend in May), it will be nestled in between The Avengers and Spider-Man 3, which opened to $151M this weekend in 2007. Actually, Marvel Comics characters own the first weekend of May, as nine Marvel films (including characters Marvel doesn’t control as far as film rights go: Spider-Man, X-Men, Wolverine) will have had the best summer starts. The lone exception is Universal’s The Mummy Returns, which opened with $68.1M in 2001.

A complete breakdown of this weekend’s top 10 coming soon.

Travis Leamons is one of the Inside Pulse Originals and currently holds the position of Managing Editor at Inside Pulse Movies. He's told that the position is his until he's dead or if "The Boss" can find somebody better. I expect the best and I give the best. Here's the beer. Here's the entertainment. Now have fun. That's an order!