Just about a year after Marvel’s “The Avengers” set the record for biggest weekend in box office history, “Iron Man 3” comes along to provide the second best. There’s not much precedence for this sort of thing – spinning a successful franchise (“Iron Man”) into another, more lucrative brand (“The Avengers”) and then back out. There was some expectation that “Iron Man 3” would appeal to the exact same audience as “The Avengers,” but that simply wasn’t a realistic proposition. Maybe some people are “Captain America” fans, and some are “Hulk” fans. And most love “Iron Man.”
As we speculated earlier, the numbers top the $169 million taken in by 2011’s “Harry Potter And The Deathly Hollows Pt. 2” to give Marvel seven of the top twenty five opening weekends in box office history, a run of dominance that’s only expected to continue through 2015’s “The Avengers 2.” The worldwide box office also continues to buoy “Iron Man 3,” with the numbers reaching $680 million global take through the end of Sunday. That it should surpass the last two “Iron Man” films isn’t a surprise, given this is the first time this series has ventured into 3D territory. That it should take ten days to surpass the $623 million take of “Iron Man 2” is a little more surprising. Most likely with “Iron Man 3” we’ll have the year’s first billion dollar grossing film, the second in two years for Marvel and Disney.
Apparently Marvel has no plans for a fourth “Iron Man” film, with rumor having it that this is it for the series. If anything, this film solidifies Robert Downey Jr.’s position as one of the most bankable actors in the industry. Downey seems likely to return for “The Avengers 2” but beyond that, he’s beginning to enter his fifties, and he might want some variety, as “Avengers 2” will be the sixth time he has portrayed Tony Stark in a seven-year period (including the brief cameo in “The Incredible Hulk”).
