If you’d have told me five years ago that Marvel Z-listers the Guardians of the Galaxy would end up undisputed kings of the summer box office, I’d have accused you of pulling my leg. But hey, here we are in 2017, where Donald J. Trump is President and America is going absolutely nuts for a loveable tree and his ferocious raccoon buddy. How nuts? Well, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 took in $17m last night, scoring the most lucrative Thursday of 2017 thus far.
In projections that’ll put a smile on Kevin Feige and Disney’s faces, the well-received space adventure is projected to rake in a cool $150m over the weekend and that, coupled with the over $150m it’s already scored from international release, puts the film on track to have raked in $400m by Monday morning. Not too shabby, right? And if it keeps up at that pace, it could very well end up with over a billion dollars when all’s said and done.
This puts it in some prestigious company, with The Avengers, Age of Ultron, Iron Man 3 and Captain America: Civil War being the previous Marvel Studios films to have broken the significant billion dollar marker (with The Avengers sitting pretty at the top of the charts with a mind-boggling $1.5 billion). It remains to be seen how far Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 will go, but audiences are loving it so far and it’ll be interesting to see if these scrappy underdogs can threaten Marvel’s most famous titans. At any rate, it looks set to eclipse its prequel, which exceeded expectations with a $770m worldwide haul.
