Captain America: The First Avenger is #1 at the box office after beating out the final film to the Harry Potter series, Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
The super hero comic flick from Marvel Studio stars Chris Evans as Steve Roberts/Captain America and has brought in a more than expected $65.8 million, shocking even Paramount Studio head Brad Grey. Captain America: The First Avenger brought in over $4 million in midnight showings out-grossing all other 2011 superhero movies including Thor, The Green Lantern and X-Men:First Class.
All of this is great news but for Captain America to be profitable it will have to perform well overseas. With production costs of $140 million and strong American-patriotic themes, it will be interesting to see what the oversea results are. So far only released in Italy, the majority of Europe , Latin America and Asia will be seeing Captain America for the first time next weekend. The full world-wide release goes as late a September 2nd in Turkey.
This has been a great summer for Paramount Studios. Just this week Transformers: Dark of the Moon became the highest overseas grossing film ever release by Paramount with an international total of $556.6 million.
Harry Potter’s ticket sales dropped 72% from $169 million to $48 million this weekend, one of the worst box office drops in history. It does not seem to matter much though because after already grossing over $834 million in its first two weekends, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 is easily on its way to breaking the $1 billion barrier.
What kind of international numbers will we see out of Captain America? I see the film easily breaking profit and my guess would be around $33o million. Let’s see what happens!