Wonder Woman

There’s a certain amount of irony to Spider-Man: Homecoming displacing Wonder Woman as the top-grossing superhero movie on the current box-office chart. As it turns out, Wonder Woman’s continuing success in theaters means that it has achieved something that no movie since the original Spider-Man has accomplished: Achieving a total domestic gross that is nearly four times its opening weekend numbers.

It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for, Edgar Wright fans: did the filmmaker’s action-packed Baby Driver score big with audiences? Or does this weekend belong to sequels, sequels, and more sequels? This weekend was always going to belong to Despicable Me 3— it’s a big hit with the kiddos, don’t you know— but there’s definitely some room for optimism in how the rest of the weekend Top 10 shook out. Here’s the numbers as of Sunday afternoon:

We all knew Wonder Woman was going to be a box office hit — passing $1 million in its opening weekend, becoming the highest-grossing female-directed live-action film ever made shortly after that — and how it’s shattered a new record. Wonder Woman is now the highest-grossing movie of the DC Extended Universe, passing Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman in box office sales.

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If you only look at the surface numbers, this was a pretty predictable week at the box office. Wonder Woman did well, The Mummy did not, and everything else shook out accordingly. That being said, there’s some pretty interesting narratives emerging in the how and why of this weekend’s box office report. Let’s take a look at the rankings as of Sunday afternoon and dive into some of the specifics:

Some 'Wonder'-ful news for one of this year's biggest blockbusters.

Wonder Woman just had a record-setting opening weekend. While everyone was at the theater watching her, the woman who plays the Amazonian princess, Gal Gadot, got into a back-and-forth on Twitter with the Asgardian God of Thunder over a question comics fans have debated for years: Who would win in a fight, Wonder Woman or Thor?

Based on how this weekend’s box office numbers shaped up, odds are good that you either saw Wonder Woman this weekend or you avoided the theater altogether. It was a record-setting few days for everyone’s favorite warrior princess  —  sorry, Xena  —  but things were decidedly less rosy if your movie was… well, literally anything else. Here are the box office estimates as of Sunday afternoon:

Like everything else in the movie business, trailers chase trends. Somebody does something, that thing becomes a huge hit, and then everyone copies it. That’s particularly evident in the use of music in trailers. For a few years, Inception BRAAAHMS were everywhere. Recently, we’ve been buried beneath an onslaught of trailers with sad versions of pop songs (so many, in fact, I made two different lists of them). Now there’s a new trend: Imagine Dragons.

As we noted in our review of Wonder Woman, the primary antagonist of the film, the God of War Ares, is a bit of a mystery. Early in the film, a young Diana (Gal Gadot) is taught the origin of her race of Amazons, which involves Ares slaughtering all the other Greek gods. Many years later, Diana learns of World War I from Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) and believes it’s the work of Ares. So she sets off into the outside world to find him and kill him in order to free mankind from his influence.