Thor: The Dark World opened with the best debut weekend for a Marvel Studios movie that doesn’t feature Iron Man — but how does it stack up at the box office to all other cinematic superheroes?
Photo Illustration by Justine Zwiebel for BuzzFeed
We live in an age of maximum superheroics. Costume-clad comic book champions are dominating the multiplex now with a constancy and — more often than not — success rate never before seen in Hollywood. Case in point: Thor: The Dark World just opened in the U.S. with an estimated $86.1 million weekend, a 31% increase from the first Thor's debut in 2011. Even more impressive: In two weeks, the film has already pulled in an estimated $240.9 million overseas, which is nearly 90% of the total international gross for the first Thor. With no major competition next weekend, Thor: The Dark World should easily join Man of Steel and Iron Man 3 as one of the top 10 grossing films of this year. Next year, Captain America, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Guardians of the Galaxy will vie for the box office crown, and in 2015, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Batman and Superman, and Ant-Man will do the same.
With so many superheroes competing for our eyeballs at the movie theater, it is worth taking stock of which heroes have most proven their box office mettle. Using figures from Box Office Mojo, BuzzFeed has crunched the numbers to come up with as objective a breakdown as possible for the most, and least, successful superheroes of the last 35 years.
Before we get to the list, however, a few words on our methodology — this gets pretty deep-dish nerdy, so feel free to skip ahead to the rankings if you prefer.
To be considered, a character had to be a classically defined superhero initially derived from a comic book or graphic novel — so Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen, superheroic though they may be, don't count. They also had to be the leading characters in their own film with their name in the title, meaning that Marvel Studios stars Black Widow, Hawkeye, and Loki can't be considered. And that film also had to be released in the United States, which kept curiosities like 1990's Captain America — which went straight to video in the U.S. — from factoring into Cap's overall box office numbers.
As for the numbers themselves, we took into account five different metrics:
First, the total number of films the character starred in — studios generally won't make a sequel unless there is some money to be made.
Next, both the average total domestic box office for those films, and the average opening domestic box office, both adjusted for inflation. (For movies that opened during a long holiday week and weekend, like 2004's Spider-Man 2, we only included the first three days of release as the fairest point of comparison with other films.) Why separate opening weekend from the total gross? Studios can take home as much as 90% of the opening weekend gross for a major blockbuster film, ceding more of the box office to exhibitors as the weeks progress — so both figures matter in different ways.
Then we included a figure called the average domestic box office multiplier. The number reflects how many times over a movie increased its debut numbers — the higher that number, the better the word-of-mouth and repeat business for a film. (For example, a movie that opens with $20 million and goes on to gross $200 million would have a multiplier of 10.)
And finally, we included the average global total gross for each character. In the last 10 years, global figures have become Hollywood's top barometer for overall success, so we felt it was necessary to use the global figures in our final analysis. But since there is no reliable way to track ticket price inflation across the entire planet, we reflected the fact that the numbers are not adjusted for inflation in our final calculation.
Which brings us to the final weighted rating. We weighted each metric (from 0-1) according to how that hero faired in comparison to all the other heroes (i.e., for number of movies, those with the most movies got a 1, the least got 0, and everyone else fell in between proportionally). We then added all those figures together, weighting the average global total gross less than all the other figures, and used the final number to rank all the characters.
One last note on The Avengers: Figuring out how to include the third-highest-grossing movie of all time in the overall numbers for Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and Hulk proved to be no easy task. The movie was a true ensemble film, and it did so astronomically well in comparison to every other Marvel Studios film that to treat it as a starring vehicle for the characters was unfairly skewing their numbers — but not including The Avengers at all also wasn't fair. So using screen-time figures derived by Vulture, we created weighted averages for all four characters. It's not perfect, but it's as close to an objective measure of the film's box office impact for those characters as we could get.
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