Aquaman wins box office for a third week and keeps winning overseas

Just a few years ago, Aquaman (real name: Arthur Curry) was the butt of everyone's DC-related jokes. Well, who's laughing now, people?!

James Wan's live-action take on the submerged hero will have no trouble sinking its magical trident into the box office's top spot for the third week in a row with an estimated $30.5 million—the first box office of the new year, by the way.

More than that, the CGI-heavy comic book flick is now DC's highest-grossing film overseas, beating out Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012) with $649.3 million. Domestically speaking, Aquaman is No. 8, trailing behind Tim Burton's Batman (1989), Man of Steel (2013), and even Suicide Squad (2016).

However, when you combine the movie's domestic and overseas ticket sales, it weighs in at No. 3, just behind Nolan's last two Dark Knight features with a whopping $940.7 million. That makes it pretty much inevitable that Aquaman will break the $1 billion barrier very soon, the first DCEU offering to accomplish such a feat.

Disney's Mary Poppins Returns failed to dominate Sony's newly-released Escape Room for second place with the latter exceeding expectations by raking in $18 million.

Poppins will take the third spot thanks to a respectable $15.8 million. In its third week, the Emily Blunt-led movie has made over $128 million domestically and $85 million overseas, giving the long-awaited sequel an international total of $213.7 million.

A mixture of the Saw franchise and David Fincher's The Game, Escape Room takes its titular concept to another level when a group of strangers must fight for their lives by solving clues in an escape-based exercise that gets stranger and stranger with each passing minute. Directed by Adam Robitel (Insidious: The Last Key), the sci-fi horror/thriller stars Deborah Ann Woll (Daredevil) and Tyler Labine (Tucker & Dale vs Evil).

Paramount's Bumblebee and Sony Animation's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (in their third and fourth weekends respectively) are battling for fourth place with around $13 million apiece. That being said, it looks like the animated Spidey movie will just edge out the the Transformers origin story. In terms of global gross, Spider-Verse stands at $234+ million, while Bumblebee has only $196+ million to its name.

(via The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Box Office Mojo)

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