Last year, Disney's box-office take was almost $2.3 billion worth of solid gold hits. Part of that massive haul was due to a quick start in the first half of the year, as the studio had crossed the $1 billion mark by June 2015. And now, thanks to the last two months of box-office gold, Disney has become the fastest studio to cross the $1 billion mark – with Captain America: Civil War being the film to do the honors.
The news comes from ComicBook.com, as the $181.8 million take from Captain America's latest adventure has boosted the studio over the golden mark – making it the fastest climb to $1 billion thus far. The previous record was held by Universal, whose 2015 was made memorable with films like Furious 7 and Jurassic World kicking their profits to the same metric by June 14th. And much like Universal's first half of 2015, Disney's 2016 started with a hell of a roster that's still making money to this day.
Disney's biggest hit before Captain America: Civil War was March's Zootopia, which is still in the top 10 after opening in the first week of its release month. Its total grosses, worldwide, have reached $956 million – making the film the second highest grossing, non-Pixar animated effort from the legendary studio. Also a huge hit for 2016 was Disney's The Jungle Book, which has only been showing since April 15th, but has pounced on $776 million in almost a month of box office grosses. With the clash of Avengers bringing in $181.8 million in one weekend of general release, Disney's record breaking grosses are only looking up.
The studio has some promising films on its release schedule for the rest of 2016, including this month's Alice Through The Looking Glass, next month's Finding Dory, and both another Marvel and Star Wars movie being released in November and December, respectively. All four offerings have track records and data that would suggest that their relative grosses are primed to keep Disney in the black for the rest of the year. While this makes up for the deafening thud that the studio's first film of the year, The Finest Hours, it still might stall a little bit due to increased competition. In particular, Alice Through The Looking Glass and Finding Dory have X-Men: Apocalypse and Central Intelligence to square off against.
While the Finding Nemo sequel may have a better time fending off Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Kevin Hart at the cinemas, the sequel to Tim Burton's $1 billion cash cow may not do as well against the third and final entry in the trilogy that started with X-Men: First Class. In other words, they may want to help Captain America: Civil War along its way to being another Marvel box office juggernaut, as they might face a bit of a rough summer ahead.
Captain America: Civil War is currently in theaters now, with Alice Through The Looking Glass opening on May 27th and Finding Dory on June 17th.
