The recently released Furious 7 isn’t just the most ridiculous entry in the fourteen-year-old Fast and Furious franchise — it’s also become by far the biggest opening weekend earner in the entire series. This weekend saw Furious 7 take $384 million worldwide, with $143.6 million of that coming from the domestic audience. That makes it not only the biggest April opening weekend of all time — previous record holder Captain America: The Winter Soldier got a comparatively paltry $95 million — but the ninth biggest opening weekend of all time.
Furious 7 breaks box office records with explosive opening weekend
New movie becomes the ninth biggest opening of all time
New movie becomes the ninth biggest opening of all time
To put that in perspective, that’s more than every single movie in the Twilight saga, more than Sony’s first Spider-Man movie, and far more than every single Star Wars movie got on their first weekends. Furious 7’s domestic launch was the biggest since 2013’s The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the sixth biggest movie launch in US history, which raked in $158 million on its first weekend.
Furious 7 got more money than every single Twilight movie
The rest of the top ten is dominated by superhero movies — fitting, given that Furious 7 follows exactly the same template. The newest movie is certainly bigger and brasher than previous outings (amazing such a thing was actually possible), but keeping track of fifteen years of increasingly wacky antics from Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, and the sadly departed Paul Walker was a tricky task for first-time Furious director James Wan. The result is a bit of a mess, redeemed somewhat by skydiving cars, constant affirmations of family and friendship, and The Rock flexing so hard that he sloughs a protective cast off his arm.
Verge Video: Every Fast and Furious movie plot in 10 minutes
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