"Black Panther" Is Going to Have a Huge Opening Weekend
The long-awaited “Black Panther” movie was smashing records long before its release, and it’s premiere weekend is expected to be no different.
Beatrice Verhoeven, film reporter at The Wrap, says that while the film was originally expected to bring in a little under $150 million over the President’s Day holiday, there’s now no telling what it can do.
“I think tracking is all over the place because word of mouth is blowing up,” she told Cheddar. “We’re seeing now $175 million...I’ve seen some people on Twitter say $200 million.”
Tickets for “Black Panther” were available for presale on January 10 and brought in more orders in the first 24 hours than any other Marvel movie.
That momentum continued into its preview night, with the movie raking in $25.2 million Thursday, ahead of estimates for $22 to $24 million, and narrowly edging out “Captain America: Civil War,” which made $25 million in May 2016. It’s now got the second biggest preview-night haul for Marvel, behind only “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” which brought in $27.6 million in May 2015.
Verhoeven says the number is particularly significant for a February release, having doubled the number of the previous record-holder “Deadpool.”
“May is the start of the summer blockbuster season,” she said. “So you’ll have the big tentpole movies open from May to the middle of August. That’s when the big blockbusters used to come, so ‘Deadpool’ was an anomaly.”
The chief suspect in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway has admitted he beat the young Alabama woman to death on a beach in Aruba after she refused his advances. New details in the killing emerged Wednesday as Joran Van der Sloot pleaded guilty to extorting Holloway's mother, resolving a case that has captivated the public’s attention for nearly 20 years.
The trial of a Fugees rapper, who was convicted this year in multimillion-dollar political conspiracies, stretched across the worlds of politics and entertainment — and now the case is touching on the tech world with arguments that his defense attorney bungled the case, in part, by using an artificial intelligence program to write his closing arguments.
Israel said Wednesday that it will allow Egypt to deliver limited quantities of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, the first crack in a 10-day siege on the territory. Palestinians reeled from a massive blast at a Gaza City hospital that killed hundreds the day before and grew increasingly desperate as food and water supplies ran out.
A 4000-year-old slab of rock is being dubbed a treasure map for archaeologists. The rock was found in 1900 at the site of an ancient tomb in northwestern France and it was declared Europe's oldest known map in 2021.
Hundreds of people gathered for a vigil honoring a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy who was stabbed to death over the weekend by his family's landlord in an apparent hate crime.
