‘Logan’ Box Office Hit: Highest Opening Weekend For Any Wolverine Movie

The Logan box office success that Fox Studios is enjoying is a nice turnaround from the significantly lower box office numbers the studio saw with its last Wolverine movie – The Wolverine. In fact, Logan had the highest opening weekend for any of the three Wolverine movies. Even better, with audiences and critics loving this film – which didn’t happen with The Wolverine– it’s likely that the final tally in theaters will be much higher than either of the two previous films.

Current Logan Box Office Estimates

Although the final numbers for the opening weekend of Logan won’t be known until Monday, Box Office Mojo projects that this latest outing for Wolverine will take in $85,300,000 between Thursday and Sunday nights. This places it well ahead of the $53,113,752 the second Wolverine film – The Wolverine– took in during its opening weekend in July 2013.

And this even puts the film just a hair ahead of the first Wolverine solo movie – X-Men Origins: Wolverine– which brought in $85,058,003 during its opening weekend back in May 2009. It should be noted though that both the first and second Wolverine film’s experienced a significant drop in box office numbers in the following week.

Bad word-of-mouth and sharply critical opinions from movie reviewers hit both of these previous Wolverine movies hard once people knew what they were getting. Most moviegoers and critics felt these films didn’t live up to the nature of the character in the comic books. In part, this was largely because both films had to adhere to a PG-13 rating.

The current Wolverine film Logan is also doing very well overseas, already taking in $152,500,000 outside the United States. This gives the film a grand total of $237,800,000 in box office receipts so far. Even though movie is unlikely to break the Deadpool box office numbers of last year, you never know what the coming weeks will bring.

At the very least, it seems clear that Logan will have a much higher final box office tally than either of the two previous Wolverine films.

Logan Box Office Next Weekend

While it’s impossible to project with any certainty just what the specific numbers for Logan will be next weekend, it seems likely that the drop off in box office revenue for this particular Hugh Jackman outing as the character of Wolverine will be far less precipitous than in the two previous less well-received films.

The critical reception for what is supposed to be Hugh Jackman’s last portrayal of Wolverine has been tremendously positive, with most reviewers gushing about his performance – as well as that of Patrick Stewart as an aged and ailing Professor X. Even the young British actress Dafne Keen – playing the part of X-23 – gave an amazingly nuanced and realistic performance for a child actor.

R-Rated Logan Box Office Numbers

Even though there have been R-rated comic book-based movies before, it wasn’t until the massive success of last year’s R-rated Deadpool that studio executives at Fox – and elsewhere – came to accept the idea that comic book-based movies aimed solely at adults could actually succeed at the box office.

In fact, it is highly unlikely that Logan would have even been green lit as an R-rated movie if Deadpool had not been the smash hit it was last year. But by removing the limitations of a PG-13 rating, Logan was able to be the movie that fans of the character had always wanted to see. Wolverine in the comic books is violent, bloody and unmerciful, so to finally see that version of the character onscreen was inevitably going to result in massive Logan box office numbers.

[Featured Image by Fox Studios]