X-Men: Days of Future Past Generates $91 Million Opening, $110 Million Holiday Weekend

In spite of rumors that the film would generate surprisingly-large numbers, Fox’s X-Men: Days of Future Past is looking to make almost exactly what the studio predicted for it at the beginning of the weekend.That’s a $90.7 million three-day opening frame, making it the third-biggest opening of 2014, and a total of $110 million for the four-day holiday weekend.It still isn’t quite big enough to unseat Brett Ratner’s $102 million/$122 million three- and four-day totals for X-Men: The Last Stand on Memorial Day weekend in 2006…but nobody much was predicting that it would. The $90 million opening is the second-biggest in the franchise’s history, behind The Last Stand but $5 million ahead of X2: X-Men United. The Last Stand was the capper of the original X-Men trilogy and generated a ton of revenue off the goodwill of that franchise, but fans largely hated it and after that and the equally-unpopular X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the films’ box office earnings went into a tailspin with X-Men: First Class and The Wolverine earning nothing like their predecessors in spite of much better reputations and reviews.The next installment in the franchise, X-Men: Apocalypse, is slated for 2016 with a Wolverine stand-alone film coming soon after. The Wolverine director James Mangold will return for that film, which is rumored to be based on the “Old Man Logan” arc from the comics. It’s not yet clear whether embattled Days of Future Past director Bryan Singer will return for Apocalypse.