From BoxOfficeMojo.com….
For Disney, the wait definitely turned out to be worth it as its long-delayed Marvel tentpole Black Widow came storming out of the gate with a huge $80 million opening at the North American box office, smashing the previous pandemic-era record set by F9: The Fast Saga just three weeks ago.
While the Scarlett Johansson superhero epic also cleaned up overseas, perhaps the second-biggest surprise of the weekend was that the secretive studio revealed that Black Widow tacked on another $60 million in Premier Access rentals through its Disney Plus streaming service.
Originally slated to hit theaters back in May 2020, Black Widow saw its release date rescheduled several times as COVID-19 continued to keep multiplexes dark throughout the pandemic.
In fact, last summer was the first without a splashy Marvel offering in recent memory (the last MCU film to open in theaters was Spider-Man: Far From Home, which bowed to a $92.6 million first weekend over the first three days of the Fourth of July weekend in 2019). All of the waiting just seemed to stoke fanboys and fangirls’ appetites, however, as evidenced by Black Widow’s $80 million debut. And it appears they got their money’s worth as the film snagged an ‘A-‘ grade from CinemaScore and earned an 80% fresh rating from critics and a 92% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes.
