Lively vs Reynolds: Deadpool & Wolverine cross the $1 billion global milestone, just edging out It Ends With Us.
Blake Lively, and husband Ryan Reynolds, are battling it out for box office supremacy.
It’s been a lucrative month for the Reynolds-Lively household.
This past weekend saw Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively battling it out for box office supremacy as Deadpool & Wolverine continued a three-week hot streak and It Ends with Us exceeded expectations with a splashy debut. There’s no need to crown a champion: both films have already won big.
The Marvel movie, which reunites Reynolds’ Deadpool with Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), just barely eked out a win by earning an estimated $54 million at the domestic box office, bringing the tally to $494 million, per Comscore. Worldwide, the film has now surpassed $1 billion, making it the second film to do so in 2024, after Pixar’s Inside Out 2.
Meanwhile, the highly anticipated adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s New York Times bestseller blew past projections by opening to $50 million domestically. Abroad, the film earned another $30 million, bringing its global total to $80 million.
It Ends With Us, the first of Hoover’s books to be adapted for the big screen, stars Lively as flower shop owner Lily Bloom, who overcomes a traumatic childhood only to cross paths with charming neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (director Justin Baldoni) and begin an intense romance with an unexpected dark side. Things take a dramatic turn with Lily’s first love, Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), suddenly reenters her life, forcing her to make an impossible choice about her future.
Already, Lively and Reynolds are basking in their success together: the actress recently credited her husband with penning the fan-favorite It Ends with Us rooftop scene that sees her character first meet Ryle. Meanwhile, Lively featured briefly in Deadpool & Wolverine as a female variant of Reynolds’ character, as did the couple’s daughters, Inez and Olin.
“He works on everything I do,” Lively told E! News of Reynolds. “I work on everything he does. So his wins, his celebrations are mine and mine are his.”
Outside of the Lively-Reynolds households, a different summer blockbuster is continuing to blaze a successful path: Twisters picked up another $15 million, for a domestic tally of $222 million. Globally, the film has earned $310 million after just four weeks in theaters. Starring Glen Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Anthony Ramos, the film tells the story of serious storm chasers forced to work alongside a crew of unorthodox “Tornado Wranglers” as they seek to help the residents of Oklahoma’s Tornado Valley.
Elsewhere, Borderlands suffered a flop, debuting to an underwhelming $8.8 million ($16.5 million globally). The star-studded adventure, based on the hit video game series of the same name, features Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, and Jack Black as a crew of misfits who embark on an adventure to find the daughter of the galaxy’s most powerful man (Edgar Ramirez).
“I wanted to make something totally bonkers and bat-s— crazy, that has the insanity of The Fifth Element or Escape From New York,” director Eli Roth previously told Entertainment Weekly for a July cover story. “I think there’s a spirit of anarchy and absurdity in the game. I wanted the movie to have that same spirit as well: a movie completely made by lunatics.”
Rounding out fifth is Despicable Me 4, hanging on with another $8 million intake during its sixth week of release. The fourth film in Illumination’s hit franchise, which also birthed the Minions, has now earned $330 million domestically and a whopping $807 million globally.