Avengers: Endgame Passes Black Panther at the Domestic Box Office

Avengers: Endgame is continuing to reign at the box office, and it looks like that means the film crossing yet another milestone. As of today, Endgame has officially passed Black Panther at the domestic box office.

Endgame‘s stateside gross currently sits at $724 million, which out grosses Black Panther‘s $700 million domestic total. This now makes Endgame the third highest-grossing domestic film of all time, behind Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Avatar.

With Endgame boasting a worldwide box office of $2.485 billion and counting, some Marvel fans probably won’t be shocked by this latest box office milestone. But as it turns out, some of the film’s cast and crew weren’t expecting the film to perform as unbelievably well as it has.

“We were def surprised,” co-director Anthony Russo explained shortly after the film was released. “You could never predict something like this.”

“We saw numbers coming in Tuesday from the international market,” co-director Joe Russo added. “We had good momentum — it’s sort of shock and awe. It’s a testament to serialized storytelling and this movie is benefited from that.”

And while it’s unclear what box office total the film will eventually cap out on, it’s safe to say that audiences have been pretty massively impacted by the Marvel Cinematic Universe epic.

“We wanted to bring to a conclusion a series of movies in a way that had never been done before,” Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said in a recent interview. “Harry Potter had an ending because there were only so many books. Lord of the Rings, too. But we thought, 22 movies in, wouldn’t it be fun to bring some finality to the storyline?”

“It was when the job was first brought out to us, and we began to think, ‘If we take this on, what does it mean?’” co-writer Christopher Markus recently shared with ComicBook.com. “Is it just writing Avengers 3 and 4, and there’s a villain, and you have to write an adventure movie? And it was clear that it wasn’t. And it was clear from everyone’s attitude toward it that they really wanted to make something kind of historic and to culminate everything that had been coming before it. And then, we took the job. And while we were shooting [Captain America:] Civil War, which hadn’t happened yet, we began mulling it, and compiling just a thousand possible ideas for it. So that would be summer 2015.”

Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame are in theaters now. Spider-Man: Far From Home will land in theaters on July 2nd.