‘Bumblebee’ Beats ‘Aquaman’ at International Box Office

It looks like Bumblebee isn’t running out of gas at the box office yet.

According to a new report from Variety, Bumblebee took the top spot in international markets this weekend, grossing $82.7 million in 63 foreign markets. In its debut in China alone, the film earned $59.4 million, as it debuted in 9,180 locations. This brings the film’s total box office to $289 million worldwide.

This ends the four-week box office streak that Aquaman has held internationally, with the DC Extended Universe film grossing $56.2 internationally this weekend. Aquaman currently holds $940 million worldwide, with the film projected to break $1 billion within the next week.

While Aquaman still holds a much larger gross, the fact that Bumblebee unseated the film in one way or another is certainly of note. Bumblebee‘s overwhelmingly positive response from critics and fans did not immediately translate at the box office, something that the film’s stars have approached in a unique way.

“[The film] has a lot of heart and a lot of soul. I think that that’s what people are learning after they see it,” Hailee Steinfeld, who stars in the film as Charlie, said in a recent interview. “And so, here I am, spreading the word. This is a film with a lot of heart and soul. If that’s what you’re looking for, you can find that as well as what you know and love from Transformers films.”

“There’s always going to be competition,” John Cena, who co-stars as Agent Burns, added. “In the world of WWE, there’s always something that can take… they can give a consumer another way to buy a ticket. So I’m used to a very competitive atmosphere and I don’t… you never want to… you never don’t want competition. I think competition is good for all movies, and it’s good for moviegoers. So I’m very happy with what it’s done.”

And while the film has not grossed as much as its Transformers predecessors, it has marked a new narrative direction for the movie franchise.

“Reboot, I always hate that word because, for one, I’m not sure I really understand what it means,” franchise producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura said in a previous interview. “We are going to do another big Transformers movie. It is going to be different than the ones that we’ve done before.”

“It’s not like we look at the elements of what we did before and go, ‘Well, let’s not do this’ or ‘Let’s not do that,’” Di Bonaventura explained. “It’s more about how do you evolve the experience for the fans. Let the fan have a new experience. When we did the first movie, at first there was a lot of pushback that we weren’t doing it the way it was done before,” he added. “My feeling was always that if we’d done it, you would’ve gone, ‘Well, I’ve already seen it.’ So how do you evolve things forward is I think the hardest thing because you’ve got to retain why people love it, but at the same time if you give them the same experience, they’re going to be bored with it.”

Bumblebee is in theaters now.