Black Panther tops The Last Jedi in four-day opening weekend

Black Panther earned $241.96 million in North America over its four-day opening weekend, making it the second-highest grossing opening of all time, Disney confirmed to Deadline. The Marvel tentpole defied earlier estimates and beat out Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which earned $241.6 million in its debut last year. After yesterday, the film trails only The Force Awakens’ massive $288 million four-day total.

This is just the latest of several records broken by Black Panther. The movie, directed by Ryan Coogler, is also the biggest February debut of all time, the second-highest grossing Marvel movie behind The Avengers, and the highest-grossing film by a black director in history.

With a $200 million production budget, Black Panther is already out-earning box office projections, thanks in part to an aggressive, months-long marketing push from Disney. But much of Black Panther’s box office success actually seems to be coming from word-of-mouth and social media, spurred on by fans eager to share the experience, regardless of what trolls on Twitter might say. The runaway success had Disney revising the film’s box-office estimates throughout the weekend. According to Variety, the studio had originally projected a $218 million opening, but bumped that to $235 million Sunday morning. The film actually ended up performing even better than that, thanks to a Monday gross of $40.2 million, earning Black Panther the record for the biggest Monday box-office gross in history. Variety reports that the film’s global gross to date is at $426.6 million.