The eyes of the pop culture world may be on Comic-Con this weekend, but the eyes of a whole bunch of Marvel fans are on Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds poking each other with sharp, stab-y things: Variety reports that the pair's new superhero buddy flick Deadpool & Wolverine is already on track to have one of the biggest domestic openings for an R-rated movie of all time, with its $96 million take on Friday alone making it the highest single day-opening ever scored in the "Wow, Marvel's letting us say 'Fuck' now!" rating category.This is not wholly surprising, in so far as D&W was already doing some fairly massive pre-sale numbers, having moved $8 million in tickets fully two months before the movie actually came out. But it still makes for the best opening day of the year—nearly doubling the take of Inside Out 2—and is actually the sixth-highest domestic opening day of all time, as long as you're not adjusting for pesky inflation. Not bad for a movie whose main villains are Time Wambsgans and, like, the 20th weirdest villain Grant Morrison ever created! It also marks Marvel's first genuine success (that wasn't written and directed by the guy that literally now runs their Direct Competition) in a minute, after the lackluster performance of both Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels.Per Deadline, that opening day has already bumped up what were already pretty rosy estimates for the movie's opening weekend, which now sit somewhere between $195 and $205 million. That not only means Deadpool & Wolverine is set to make back its fairly hefty budget in a single weekend, but also that it's the single biggest opening of Reynolds', Jackman's, and director Shaun Levy's careers by, like, a lot. (Jackman hasn't had an opening even remotely as big since X-Men: The Last Stand way the hell back in 2006, and even that only posted roughly half these numbers.) It's a hit, is the general vibe—although it'll be interesting to see if a film that's ridden a pretty hefty "event movie" hype wave (i.e., "Look at all our cameos!") will have the staying power of the more family-friendly Inside Out 2. (Which is still going to likely come in fourth at the box office this week, after Twisters and Despicable Me 4, despite having been in theaters for two months at this point.)
