10 Biggest Superhero Movie Opening Weekends Of All Time

1. The Avengers

Release date: May 4, 2012

Opening weekend total: $207.4 million

It seems like a distant memory now, but there was a time not that many decades ago when the Avengers weren’t Marvel’s premier superhero team in any form of media. The world used to revolve around the X-Men, and the Avengers were a distant second in comic books and not even being thought about as a movie franchise.

Marvel managed to change that situation by successfully launching several of the heroes who came together as the on-screen Avengers in their own solo movies first, and while neither the first Captain America nor the first Thor film caused box office hysteria, they did well enough to prove they were viable heroes. They primed the pump for The Avengers, pulling off something not even the most optimistic Marvel execs could have been sure would happen.

Add in a few more heroes, a popular director with comic book cred in Joss Whedon and the rest is box office history. The Avengers sprinted out of the gate and never looked back, hauling in more than $200 million in just three days and setting a record for all U.S. movies that was barely beaten by Jurassic World in the summer of 2015 before being flattened by the Star Wars: The Force Awakens juggernaut later that same year.

Next: Highest-Grossing Superhero Movies of All Time

It remains the standard-bearer for the cape and costume crowd, one that will be difficult to dislodge from the top of this list. Unless, of course, Avengers: Infinity War lives up to the hype …