NEW YORK -- In the Ryan Reynolds-Blake Lively box-office showdown, both husband and wife came out winners.
Reynolds' Marvel Studios smash "Deadpool & Wolverine" remained the top movie in North American theatres for the third straight week with US$54.2 million in ticket sales according to studio estimates Sunday. Worldwide, it's now surpassed $1 billion. "Deadpool & Wolverine," though, was closely followed by "It Ends With Us," the romance drama starring Lively, which surpassed expectations with a stellar $50 million debut.
Together, the films created a kind of family edition of "Barbenheimer," in which a pair of very different movies thrived in part due to counterprogramming. Only this time, the opposite movies were fronted by one of Hollywood's most famous couples. The films' one-two punch wasn't entirely unprecedented. In 1990, Bruce Willis' "Die Hard 2" led the box office while Demi Moore's "Ghost" came in second.
The weekend also featured a high-priced flop. "Borderlands," the long-delayed $120-million videogame adaptation directed by Eli Roth, launched with a paltry $8.8 million for Lionsgate. The film, starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart and Jack Black, was shot all the way back in 2021. After delays and reshoots, it finally landed in theatres effectively dead-on-arrival; it scored just 10 per cent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and seems likely contend for one of the worst movies of the year.
Meanwhile, "Deadpool & Wolverine," which co-stars Hugh Jackman, continued its march through box-office records. The film, directed by Shawn Levy, is only the second R-rated movie to reach $1 billion, following 2019's "Joker." In three weeks, it's already one of the most lucrative Marvel releases and trails only Disney's other 2024 smash, "Inside Out" ($1.6 billion worldwide) among movies released this year.
Lively makes a cameo in "Deadpool & Wolverine" but she both stars in and produced "It Ends With Us." Adapted from the bestselling romance novel by Colleen Hoover, Lively stars as Lily Bloom, a Boston florist torn between two men, one from her present life (Justin Baldoni, who also directed the film) and another who was her first love (Brandon Sklenar).
"It Ends With Us" cost a modest $25 million to produce, so it will turn a significant profit for co-financers Columbia Pictures and Wayfarer Studios. Like another female-skewing summer-release book adaptation from Sony, "Where the Crawdads Sing," "It Ends With Us" could hold well through the typically slower August box-office period. Audiences gave it an A- CinemaScore.
Reynolds and Lively occasionally played up the convergence of their movies. Earlier this week, Reynolds posted a video of himself posing junket questions to Sklenar. The timing paid off especially for Lively, whose film doubled earlier opening-weekend forecasts.
Neon's "Cuckoo," a German Alps-set horror film by filmmaker Tilman Singer, opened with $3 million on 1,503 screen. It stars Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens.
