'Avengers: Endgame' is unbeatable. Its $350 million opening weekend is just the start.

$350 million.

That's the amount of money made from Avengers: Endgame ticket sales in the U.S. during opening weekend, based on Sunday estimates. It's a ludicrous and unheard of figure, and just a piece of the record-shattering global total of $1.2 billion.

No movie in the U.S. has ever posted an opening weekend higher than $300 million. No movie anywhere has made more than $1 billion worldwide in the five days since it opened.

Let's start with the U.S. total. It's almost $100 million more than the previous record holder, which is of course another Avengers movie. Infinity War, the immediate predecessor to Endgame, earned $257.7 million in its opening days. Prior to that, Star Wars: The Last Jedi had held the best opening weekend title, with a $220 million opening.

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Indeed, if you scroll down that record's All Time Top 10 list on BoxOfficeMojo, a few recurring features stand out. For one, nine of the 10 movies are Buena Vista productions (i.e. Disney). Half are Marvel movies — Endgame makes it six, technically. Only one on the list is more than five years old —Marvel's The Avengers.

If we put Endgame aside, the dollar difference between the best opening weekend ever and the 10th best opening weekend ever is less than $100 million. Opening weekend records are forever beatable because movies inherently get more expensive over time. 

Especially blockbusters, event movies, whatever you want to call them — they open on more 3D screens, more IMAX screens, more screens in general. It's unusual to see a year go by without some newcomer asserting its "best opening weekend ever" status.

It's not a surprise that Endgame post historic numbers, of course. It's a culminating story that's built on the backs of 21 previous movies. There isn't a single other Hollywood product that's ever come close to constructing the house of cards Marvel Studios has been piecing together since 2008.

Endgame, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole, has effectively ushered a new paradigm for event filmmaking into Hollywood. It's something that competing studios are going to work at replicating for decades to come (they already are).

I'm sharing all of this context because it highlights just how different Endgame is. Marvel's latest bested 2018's must-see blockbuster by tens of millions of dollars. Even Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which puts a period on a story that started all the way back in 1977, will likely struggle to reach that newly set bar.

In short: while opening weekend records come and go year after year, this one is going to endure. That $350 million opening is, for now, effectively unbeatable. Nothing we know of that's coming out of Hollywood in the next few years has the momentum or the wide public interest to deliver a frenzied opening weekend audience on the scale of Endgame.

Let's look at some more numbers. How does $18.6 billion sound? That's the sum of the MCU's total box office prior to Endgame. If we add the new movie's $1.2 billion opening to that figure, it's plausible to speculate that Marvel will be a $20 billion-plus franchise by the end of Endgame's second weekend. (And hey, there's still Spider-Man: Far From Home coming in July.)

Here's another number: $859 million. That's Endgame's opening weekend total for all regions outside the United States. It's another record, almost doubling that of the previous record holder, The Fate of the Furious, which opened with $443.2 million internationally.

The five-day sprint since Endgame opened to Sunday's $1.2 billion weekend estimate means it took five days to become a billion-dollar movie. That cuts the previous record set by Infinity War in half and then some — the 2018 Avengers movie was in theaters 11 days before hitting that milestone.

It's fair to speculate at this point that one of the longest-lived box office records in Hollywood is poised to fall. Since 2010, James Cameron's Avatar has held the distinction of being the top-earning movie of all time worldwide, with a global box office of $2.8 billion. 

The market now is much different, of course. Avatar was a December release, and it was able to earn as much as it did because the early months of 2010 weren't as packed with movies as Q1 months have been in more recent years. Endgame, on the other hand, is a late April launch and it's going to face lots of competition from other spring and early summer blockbusters.

Avatar may continue to hang on to the record just because of Endgame's timing coupled with how much the industry has shifted over the past decade. But it's still true that nothing lasts forever in the realm of blockbuster box office records. Inflation and the rising ticket costs it prompts will always see to that. 

More to the point I've been circling around this whole time, Endgame isn't your typical blockbuster. In the future we can conceive of right now, it's effectively unbeatable. Whether or not the Avatar record falls, Endgame is now well-established as a once-in-a-generation hit.

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