What is the only movie to earn $1 billion in less than a week?
Despite the many challenges cinema faces in the 21st century, box office records still continue to be smashed.
Be it the highest-grossing films or the most eye-watering budgets, features dropped in the 2010s and ‘20s overwhelmingly dominate the respective top tens, filled to bursting point with the glut of franchise movies from the likes of the Star Wars, Marvel, and now Jurassic Park universes.
Ticket prices are more expensive than ever, snacks and popcorn can easily push a silver screen visit to over £20, but the allure of sitting in a dark room and losing ourselves for a couple of hours or more shows no real signs of dying a definitive death just yet.
Cinema as an art form’s future is certainly up for question. Much stink was kicked up when New Hollywood pioneer Martin Scorsese compared the day’s superhero craze—a ‘fad’ that’s been in full swing since 2000’s X-Men—akin to an amusement attraction, but he’s not wrong. While great films are being made on the independent level, Scorsese’s further musings in a piece for The New York Times in 2019 reached to the nub of the issue: “That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption”.
So, late-stage capitalism then? A bleak chapter for the film industry was had when Martin ‘Goodfellas’ Scorsese struggled for years to find funding for The Irishman, boasting Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel, and Joe Pesci for one last gangster hurrah, as well as not even enjoying a wide theatrical release. The major studios’ risk-averse lapse into universe business models and shoehorned multi-narrative sagas are, frankly, not just a slow cancer on cinema’s true potential, but anathema to the very thousands of years old principles of storytelling.
So, what is the only movie to earn $1 billion in less than a week?
Well, it’ll grimly stand as no surprise that such an eyewatering feat will come from the Marvel Cinematic Universe bludgeon. The business model’s ‘phase three’, 22nd punch in the face, and the direct sequel to Avengers: Infinity War, 2019’s Avengers: Endgame was another commercial monster for Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, breaking several records at once.
Once premiered at the Los Angeles Convention Center in April, Avengers: Endgame took a dizzying three days to reach the $500m global gross mark, and another two to cross over a billion, the only film to do ever do so in less than a week. After 20 days, Avengers: Endgame had hurtled to a staggering $2.5bn.
Avengers: Endgame broke its predecessor’s record as the highest-grossing superhero film of all time, enjoying over $2.7bn in ticket sales. For a time, Avengers: Endgame was the biggest-selling movie of all time of any genre, beating the previous record held by James Cameron’s Avatar sci-fi in 2009, which beat his own record established twelve years earlier with Titanic. Curiously, a significant rerelease in China saw Avengers: Endgame knocked off the top spot once again by Avatar‘s blue aliens in 2021.
