Watching how this tracks is getting a little interesting. It's still solidly in the middle of Eternals and Quantumania. But their runs are very different. Quantumania opened strong and dropped fast. Eternals opened relatively weak but held on longer--it (Eternals) actually went down in number of theaters it was showing in and went back up again. I've never seen that.Still, they pulled Eternals 40 days earlier than Quantumania. Captain America is a different kind of Marvel bomb. It opened stronger than Eternals but weaker than Quantumania. But it has better "legs" than Quantumania. Just not as good as Eternals. The other wildcard is the International box office. BoxOfficeMojo doesn't have tools to easily analyze international box office until the end of the run. Still... Calculating percentages, Domestic box office was 41% of Eternals take. It was 45% for Quantumania. For Captain America, domestic box office is 48% of its worldwide take--the highest amount for any of the films. I'm not smart enough (or invested enough) to know what that means for the bottom line, but I'm still going to stick it around $438M or so. Assuming a film needs 2.5x its budget, as most pundits estimate, to be profitable and the budget is the $180M reported, it comes up short. That said, for some reason most of the articles state that it needs $425M to be profitable. Why? The same reason the budget is reported to only be $180M: spin. They're trying to not have this movie be a failure and they're cooking every possible stat to try to get there--and they could still come up short. I don't know if I said it here, but there's no way I believe they made this movie for $180M. They made Shan Chi for $180M. And that's a supporting character from a supporting character movie. This was supposed to be the 2024 tentpole to launch the next phase of the MCU. They shelled out for Harrison Ford. Tons of CGI. Then they shelved it for a year, did 2 rounds of rewrites and 2 rounds of reshoots. Oh! On top of that, Shang Chi was made for $180M of 2021 dollars. Off the top of my head, that's something like $212M in 2025 dollars. Tell me with a straight face that budget is real.
