Deadline’s Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament has returned, and as you’ll see from the most profitable films of 2024 that we’re about to disclose, a movie’s game doesn’t end at the box office. Rather, its downstream revenues and subsequent home windows must be taken into account. Streaming continues to be a wildcard: While traditional motion picture studios such as Disney, Warner Bros, Sony, Paramount and Universal rely on lucrative pay two and pay three streamer deals to catapult their slates into the black, those streamers who’ve embraced theatrical (specifically Amazon MGM Studios and Apple Original Films) have a clandestine metric as to how they evaluate a movie’s post-cinema success. By traditional studio P&L standards, some of those releases would be considered flops. Given that, Apple and Amazon are excluded from this year’s survey. The Most Valuable Blockbuster series runs later rather than sooner as we gather the best data possible from seasoned and trusted sources on 2024’s event films, bombs, and low- to midsize-budget wins.
The Film
DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE
Disney/Marvel
The best catalyst for box office — in this case, for raunchy, balls-to-the-wall comedy — is absence making the heart grow fonder, and Disney in its inheritance of 20th Century Fox’s portion of Marvel was unabashed in letting Deadpool do his thing after so much time away. While the strikes disrupted the shoot on this Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, delaying its launch to late July, it didn’t hamper grosses one bit. Deadpool & Wolverine saw the biggest opening for a R-rated movie stateside, ahead of 2016’s Deadpool ($132.4M) and 2018’s Deadpool 2 ($125.5M) both coming from Fox. Shawn Levy, Ryan Reynolds’ wingman filmmaker on Free Guy, stepped in to take over for David Leitch, but the big sell here was the comeback of superhero movies — not just after the strike, but also after a great deal of fatigue with the genre and waning grosses. Not only did Deadpool & Wolverine have an Airplane sense of humor, but it also had the buddy-comedy sensibility of Midnight Run in Hugh Jackman’s return as the somber, moody Wolverine to Reynolds’ jolly, sassy Deadpool. Jackman yearned to return to the role despite the clawed mutant dying in 2017’s Logan. The way back for Wolverine is that he’d be a different version of himself from another part of the multiverse. Mix in massive mega-star cameos from the original Fox X-Men and New Line’s Blade movies, plus a secret turn by Blake Lively as Lady Deadpool, not to mention pop tunes like Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” playing over an ultraviolent death scenes, and you have the resurrection of superhero cinema at $1.3 billion-plus at the worldwide box office.
The Box Score
The Bottom Line
While it’s not necessary to launch a comic book movie synced up to San Diego Comic-Con, it does take on an additional halo effect for a movie when it does, not just for those on the ground in SoCal, but also those having FOMO, watching online from afar. Deadpool & Wolverine was screened at SDCC, with a bulk of the cast showing up on the first official night of the fanboy confab. The film’s $200 million production cost accounts for the start and stop and restart of production during the 2023 strikes; the SAG-AFTRA strike truly pushed the pic’s delivery down to the wire for late July. Disney showed up with stars and Kevin Feige in a big way at April 2024’s CinemaCon, with the MCU boss “F-bombing” onstage at Caesars Palace, a sign that Disney’s Marvel was ready to be bawdy. The campaign fired off with a Super Bowl trailer, which became the most-viewed for an MCU title at 365 million. The second trailer was timed to the opening of Disney/20th Century Studios’ Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (May 10). Tickets went on sale May 20 and hit a record-breaking $8M in the first 24 hours — the most presale tickets on Fandango at that point in time last year. Other beats included an in-theater silence-your-phone PSA (May 24); hysterical open-mouthed Wolverine collectible popcorn buckets announced (May 30); Peggy/Dogpool Britain’s Ugliest Dog announced (June 20); soundtrack announced (July 17); Spotify playlist launched and final trailer released (July 19); and the star-studded New York world premiere (July 22). Quorum tracking service boldly forecasted that Deadpool & Wolverine‘s U.S. opening was north of $200M+. Nobody believed the anticipation, not even Disney, which was calling the pre-opening at $180M. Why? An R-rated film was rare air for the studio; the last time Disney released them was back in the 1980s and 1990s with comedies like Ruthless People and Pretty Woman. Even with massive participations at $130M for Reynolds, Jackman and Levy, Deadpool & Wolverine mints $400M in profit, more than 2023’s most profitable superhero movies — Sony/Marvel’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse ($328M) and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3‘s ($124M) — and not far from 2018’s Black Panther, which netted $476.8M.