Truly the little engine that could, there might not be a greater movie success story this year than Deadpool. The character had a powerful comic fanbase, but was barely known to the outside world; no one thought a Deadpool movie would ever get made or do well. But after stewing in development hell for a few years, both of those things happened and now Deadpool is one of the biggest hits of the year. The R-rated superhero flick's domestic run has officially ended and the final numbers are in. Check out Deadpool's final domestic gross.
This figure comes from the Twitter account of Box Office Mojo, which reports that Deadpool has made a domestic total of $363 million. I felt like I was expecting a bigger figure (Captain America: Civil War is still in theaters and recently passed $400 million), but I didn't take the film's budget into account. Deadpool was made on just $58 million. That's crazy cheap considering this is a superhero film. For comparison, both Civil War and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice were made on a budget of $250 million, over five times as much as Deadpool's. That means that Deadpool's domestic gross made almost six times more than as its own budget. So, yeah, that's a resounding success worthy of at least a few pats on the back.
This is only the latest in a long line of good news for Deadpool. The movie broke all kinds of records at the box office, and it's the highest grossing R-rated movie ever, and it has the best R-rated opening weekend. On top of that, it's currently the highest grossing X-Men film. We'll see if X-men: Apocalypse can dethrone it, but that movie's having a slow climb up the money ladder. I don't think it's really fair to call Deadpool an X-Men movie just because two X-Men happen to be in it. It doesn't really play by the rules of an X-Men movie and it feels really disconnected to the current trilogy.
To put the final nail in the "Deadpool is so successful" coffin, the film made more than Dawn of Justice ($330 million) in America. Yep, a somewhat obscure comic book nobody (to a general audience) made more money than the two most popular superheroes ever. Fox must be crazy happy about that one.
With all this talk of Deadpool's theater success, let's not forget that the movie is currently available on Blu-ray and digital download. Here's the trailer for the home release of the movie, so that we can all remember how absolutely amazing the marketing for Deadpool was. Let's hope that we get a similar situation when the sequel rolls around.
Not much is known abut Deadpool 2 except that the entire creative team will be returning as well as star Ryan Reynolds. The story will introduce Cable for the first time and there are already several campaigns for different actors to play the character. Deadpool 2 is currently scheduled for a release at some point in 2017.
