Iron Man 3 Projected For $177 Million This Weekend

While the official numbers on Iron Man 3's midnight screenings haven't come in yet (and may not, as the studios often elect to keep those numbers designated as Friday money), Box Office Mojo predicts that Iron Man 3 will bring in $177 million at the American box office this weekend, making it one of the biggest openings of all time. That money wouldn't match last year's The Avengers, in which Iron Man teamed up with other Marvel heroes for a monster opening weekend that became the first movie ever to top $200 million. It will, however, beat out every other superhero movie's debut. While Disney doesn't like to speculate ahead of time about box office, BOM has a rival studio on the record saying that the film's box office is "looking more like Avengers which opened at $207M than Iron Man 2 which opened at $128M. Avengers helped them get much more of the family audience. This should continue that trend." This is all good news for Disney, not only in that it's a great opening but in that Iron Man 3 is under a bit of pressure to perform that The Avengers wasn't. It was nearly a month before The Avengers had serious competition for the box office crown, and by that time the film had already made something like half a billion dollars in the U.S. and become a global phenomenon. Iron Man 3, meanwhile, has two weeks before Star Trek Into Darkness crashes into theaters and is likely to draw a lot of the same audience as the Marvel movies. After releasing a week early in the international market, it looks as though Iron Man 3 could near $650 million globally by the end of this weekend.