'Black Panther' Beats 'Tomb Raider's' Opening Weekend Box Office Haul

By Edward Leano, Christian Post Contributor Monday, March 19, 2018

"Tomb Raider" should have a good chance to top the box-office charts this weekend, having freshly launched on Friday, March 16. With "Black Panther" still showing in its fifth weekend, though, the Marvel movie still came out on top — an amazing feat only matched by "Avatar."

With that, "Black Panther" has now kept its place at the top for five consecutive weekends, earning an impressive $27 million in its fifth week in theaters. "Tomb Raider" will have to settle for second place, earning a rather weak $23.5 million in what should have been its strongest weekend, as CBR noted.

"Black Panther" has also gone on to become only the seventh film ever, in all categories, to record $600 million in ticket sales in North America. The last movie that performed like that has been the mega-hit "Avatar," which came out eight years ago and grabbed the top spot in the box office charts for five consecutive weekends.

The Marvel movie has, by now, tallied a domestic haul of $605.4 million, and a massive $1.182 billion in worldwide ticket sales, as the Hollywood Reporter noted.

"Tomb Raider," meanwhile, is not performing as well as it might have in its opening weekend, recording a less than impressive $23.5 million from 3,854 theaters across North America. It did slightly better with the overseas sales taken into account, earning $102.5 million from 65 regions, for a total worldwide haul of $126 million in its first weekend.

The new "Tomb Raider" reboot may have the critics mostly praising for Alicia Vikander as this generation's Lara Croft, but there's a lot left to be desired in the actual story of the reboot, according to reviewers. It's this overall consensus that now puts the Tomatometer for the new "Tomb Raider" over at Rotten Tomatoes at a middling 49 percent.