Even though the box office has been slowed to a crawl over the last couple of weeks as the world waits with bated breath for Avatar: The Way of Water to explode out of the blocks, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has set a unique record that no other franchise in history can lay claim to.
During its fifth weekend in theaters, Ryan Coogler’s return to the fictional African nation remained at the top of the charts after bringing in an additional $11.1 million. While the frame ranked as one of 2022’s worst, it is notable for Wakanda Forever carving out a bespoke place in cinematic history for spending so long at the summit.
Not only is it the first film to spend five weekends at number one since Spider-Man: No Way Home, as if we needed any more markers to establish the MCU’s dominance at the top of the Hollywood totem pole, but the continued success of Wakanda Forever means that the self-contained Black Panther saga is now the first multi-film series to have ever seen two different movies reign supreme as the most-watched movie in the country for such a lengthy period of time.
That’s a hell of an accomplishment, especially when you can fairly state that the title hero wasn’t a household name until a few years ago outside of the comic book fandom. When you consider all of the gigantic properties to have existed over the decades, not a single one of them have had two chapters sit at the top of the domestic box office for five weeks in a row until Black Panther came along.