Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron ging afgelopen vrijdag in de Amerikaanse bioscopen draaien en breekt daar nu de nodige records. Want in de eerste weekeinde heeft deze film maar liefst $207.4 miljoen dollar opgehaald, waar van 80 miljoen op de openings dag, en dit is slechts het begin van een lange zegetocht.

On this weekend three years ago, Marvel's The Avengers set the all-time domestic opening record with $207.4 million. To give you a sense of how astonishing that number was at the time, it was almost $30 million higher than even the most optimistic pre-release projections for the film. Though box office records had been climbing steadily in the decade before The Avengers' opened, it was commonly believed that it would take at least another year for any film to break $200 million on its first weekend. After all, it took four years for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End to overtake 2002's Spider-Man: the first film to earn over $100 million on its first weekend.

But this is all ancient history now. The Avengers did break $200 million and then wound up becoming the third-highest grossing title of all-time (both worldwide and domestic), behind only Avatar and Titanic. So far, no film has come close to matching The Avengers' domestic opening, though that could all change this weekend.