While Deadpool has had to make way for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice at the box office, that doesn’t mean that Ryan Reynolds' superhero film is done making headlines or breaking records. Deadpool has continued to add millions of dollars to its total at the box office week after week, and now the film has broken one more record. It’s now the highest grossing R-rated film the world has ever seen.
The previous record holder for global box office take among R-rated films was The Matrix Reloaded with $742 million. With another solid weekend under its belt, where Deadpool took in an estimated $5 million more at the U.S. box office alone, the film now sits at $745 million globally. According to Box Office Mojo, Deadpool currently sits in third place at the domestic box office, though with less than a million dollars separating it from the number two film, American Sniper, it will almost certainly take over that spot by the end of next weekend. The number one R-rated film at the domestic box office is The Passion of the Christ. As it has a $20 million lead on the Merc with the Mouth, it will likely retain that title, but time will tell.
It’s fitting that Deadpool became the highest grossing R-rated film of all time. For no other film in recent memory was the rating viewed as important a topic as the casting or story. Comic book movies currently own the global box office, there is no genre more popular, and as such, they have nearly universally been rated PG-13, as that allows the studios to fill them was as much "mature" content as possible, while still allowing the widest possible audience into the theater. Deadpool was viewed by fans as a film that needed to be R-rated, as only that would capture the source material accurately, but doing so would limit the audience, which could potentially have risked box office success.
Eventually, Fox decided to go forth with the R-rated plan, and what was seen as a gamble at the time, now looks like one of the more brilliant moves in recent movie making. Not only was Deadpool a success as an R-rated movie, of the 108 films that BoxOfficeMojo defines as "Superhero" movies, only seven of them have grossed more than Deadpool, regardless of rating.
Deadpool is also currently the highest grossing movie of 2016 so far, though with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice doing more than half of that total in its opening weekend, that will change soon.
