Weekend Box Office: Shockingly, a Marvel movie makes some money
Fans of Thor, The Avengers, Greek mythology, 2 Broke Girls, Fabio, green screens, Lars Von Trier, Game Of Thrones, superhero films with the word dark in their titles, mallets, monsters, post-credits sequences, Filipino singers, and body-building heavy-metal singers assembled this weekend to make the new Marvel movie, Thor: The Dark World, No. 1 at the box-office. The autumn blockbuster, which basically functions as a sequel to two running franchises, made $86.1 million (or about eight times as much as the film right behind it on the charts, Jackass Senior). But before spinning that ancient copy of Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em, while obnoxiously calling to insist their major-studio rivals “can’t touch this,” Disney execs should remember that $86.1 million is not even half of what the third Iron Man movie made back in May. In terms Marvel characters could understand, that’s barely enough to cover Tony Stark’s bar tab on a slow Saturday night. Still, the Thunder God has a whole second week to keep clobbering the Yancy Street Gang (did we do that right?), as there’s nothing major opening until Nov. 22, at which point Katniss Everdeen crashes Marvel’s parade.