Thunderbolts Assembles a Mighty Start At the Box Office

May is here, and so is the summer movie season, starting with Thunderbolts. Marvel’s newest movie isn’t just a hit with audiences and critics, it’s also taking off financially. Domestically, the film has opened to $76 million at time of writing, per the Hollywood Reporter. That’s slightly past expectations pegging it in the $70-75 million range, and puts it over the 3-day openings for Shang-Chi ($75.4 million) and Eternals ($71.3 million), and a bit behind Black Widow’s ($80 million). Its international take was $86.1 million, resulting in a total of $162.1 million globally. Marvel’s been marketing Thunderbolts like mad over the last few months with trailers, ads, and cereal box stand-ins promising a dysfunctional team-up between fairly recent and somewhat older MCU antiheroes. That, combined with the mystery over the asterisk’s place in the title and the team’s place in Avengers: Doomsday, did a lot to court audience interest. It also doesn’t hurt that Marvel was openly proud of this ... Read full article.