With maximum effort and the help of Ryan Reynolds’ little black book, Disney has done something they’ve done 26 times before. Over the weekend, Deadpool & Wolverine’s global total surpassed $1.029 billion at the summer box office, displaying the drawing power of Wolverine in his yellow costume. The movie overtook Zootopia, Finding Dory, and Alice In Wonderland for the distinction and shall celebrate with a good old-fashioned Futterwacken. Additionally, Deadpool is the first Marvel movie since Spider-Man: No Way Home to cross the billion-dollar mark. If anything, it proves Marvel should probably give up on superhero movies that don’t feature a slurry of cameos. The numbers don’t lie: Nothing drives movie tickets faster than an Elektra reunion.The second movie of 2024 to cross the billion-dollar threshold, Deadpool & Wolverine, still has some ways to go before it reaches the anxiety-inducing $1.558 billion of Inside Out 2. Nevertheless, per Variety, it’s already nipping at Joker’s loafers. If and presumably when Deadpool & Wolverine overtakes Joker’s $1.07 billion, then old Wade Wilson will become the star of the highest-grossing R-rated film in history.It was a big weekend for the Reynolds/Lively household as Deadpool and Lady Deadpool ruled the box office like it was a working-class football club they recently purchased. Still, despite Blake Lively’s best efforts to put “domestic abuse fan-fiction” atop the box office, we’ll have to settle for another weekend of her husband’s Channing Tatum fan-fiction. It Ends With Us landed with an estimated $50 million and was just short of Deadpool's $54 million. It's all very sad, we know, but her efforts were appreciated. Variety notes this is the first August ever where two movies made more than $50 million in the same weekend. It’s also the first time since 1990 that a married couple shared the number one and two spots at the box office when Demi Moore and Ghost supplanted then-husband Bruce Willis’ Die Hard 2.The other big news for the weekend is the cratering box office of Borderlands. Taken off the shelf after three years and opening to brutal reviews, the movie nabbed $8.8 million on a $100 million budget. But it wasn’t all bad in genre land. Currently, Neon is having what VH-1 used to call the Best Week Ever. Two of the studio’s indie horror mind melters, Longlegs and Cuckoo, ended up in the top 10 on less than 1600 screens a piece. It wasn’t enough to dethrone Harold and the all-powerful Purple Crayon, but Cuckoo and Longlegs joined Trap* as defenders of summertime terror. Speaking of which, Trap made another $6 million, bringing its domestic total to $28.6 million. Though his movies typically make their budget back on opening weekend, M. Night Shyamalan may have to settle for the third weekend this time. It’s a twist worthy of Shyamalan himself—though not one he likes very much.Here’s the top 10 for the weekend:1) Deadpool & Wolverine2) It Ends With Us3) Twisters4) Borderlands5) Despicable Me 46) Trap7) Inside Out 28) Harold And The Purple Crayon9) Cuckoo10) Longlegs
