There is no more popular part of any superhero franchise than the origin story. And now, there is no origin story as popular on the big screen as that of Wonder Woman. For well over a decade no comic book origin story film has held a candle to the Tobey Maguire led Spider-Man, but now, that title has finally been taken as Wonder Woman has now become the highest-grossing origin story film of all time.
The original Spider-Man movie in 2002 is given a lot of the credit for helping to launch the popularity of comic book based films that we're now neck deep in today. It's not surprising that studios noticed the popularity of the genre based on the fact that Spider-Man grossed $403 million back in 2002. While plenty of comic book movies have exceeded that total since then, none have done it with the first film in their respective franchise. Deadpool came the closest last year but only made it up to $363 million. However, based on box office estimates from this past weekend, according to Box Office Mojo, Wonder Woman has finally overtaken Spider-Man with an estimated total just over $404 million.
While most comic book movies are destined to do well financially, there's always a question with every new character and franchise. With new actors and directors, fans can never be sure that each new character's film is going to be as good as they would like. While Wonder Woman has the benefit of name recognition that exceeds that of nearly every other comic book character ever created, that also meant that expectations were quite high. If reviews had not been as glowing as they were the movie likely still would have made a lot of money, but it wouldn't have done this well.
Ultimately, the thing that both Spider-Man and Wonder Woman were able to do was keep people coming to the theater even weeks after they opened. Most major films get most of the interested viewers in the first weekend, which leads to a significant box office drop in the following weeks. Both Spider-Man and Wonder Woman were able to see smaller drops than the average with each preceding week, which allowed them to pile up the ticket sales.
And Wonder Woman isn't done yet. Expect the Amazon princess to run up the score, as it took Spider-Man 15 weeks to reach its total, and Wonder Woman has broken that record in just 12 weeks. What's more, Wonder Woman made about twice as much in week 12 as Spider-Man did at the same point, which means DC's newest film is likely to last even longer in theaters. Wonder Woman is the new superhero origin to beat, and it's now become even more difficult for anybody else to even try.
