Disney kept 'Black Panther' in cinemas for SIX month so it could hit this major milestone

The Walt Disney Company likes to make money, lots of money, and it’ll go to great lengths to do it.

That was confirmed this weekend after Black Panther became the third movie ever to earn $700 million (£540 million) at the domestic box office.

Normally, the box office numbers close out after a few months of a movie being released in cinemas but after the monumental success of the Marvel film, Disney decided to keep it playing until it joined the $700 million club.

Black Panther was released in February so it’s taken six months for the studio to achieve its goal, with Forbes reporting that the film took $12,000 (£9,255) on Thursday, from 15 screens, and an extra $16,000 (£12,341) on Friday from a further 25 screens.

It finally tipped into the $700 million bracket on the weekend with the final total at $700,006,415, which means its domestic box office comes in third behind 2009’s Avatar ($760.5 million) and 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($936.7 million).

This is just one more in a long list of successes for the Ryan Coogler-directed MCU movie.

Black Panther had already broken significant records; it earned the fifth biggest opening weekend of all time, the biggest non-sequel opening weekend and the biggest solo superhero launch of all time too.

The film, led by Chadwick Boseman as the titular character and co-starring Angela Bassett, Lupita Nyong’o and Michael B. Jordan, has made a total of $1.347 billion (£1.039 billion) at the worldwide box office.

And they said black-led movies don’t sell…

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