Eternals buries Dune and the rest of the competition at the weekend box office

Apparently there’s still some juice in this Marvel Cinematic Universe thing, huh? Who could’ve seen that coming? In case you can’t tell, this is sarcasm. After all, Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings stands as one of the most successful movies of this nightmare pandemic era we’ll be living in forever, so it seems like Marvel movies are still going to be big no matter what—provided you don’t release them day-and-date on Disney+, which (at least for a Marvel movie) is a bit of a box office killer.

But we’re not talking about Shang-Chi here, we’re talking about Chloé Zhao’s Eternals, which opened to an impressive $71 million this weekend. Possibly indicating that reviews (and global pandemics) don’t really matter to Marvel fans when it comes to opening weekends, the movie is on pace to make a ton of cash both domestically and globally.

That $71 million take is also more than enough to utterly destroy all of the competition, with Dune dropping to second in its third week with only $7.6 million. It’s made nearly $84 million, so it’s doing okay, but it probably won’t catch No Time To Die and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (which made $6 million and $4 million, respectively, bringing them to $143 million and $197 million). That parenthetical means that, yes, this is yet another week where we get to hem and haw about whether or not a second movie will cross $200 million this year. It should, but who knows?!

Moving down the list, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch is actually moving up the list, expanding to 417 more theaters and making about the same amount of money it made last week, but that was enough to lift it from 10 to six on the charts. Halloween Kills fell hard, as you might expect since the spooky season is over, and Kristen Stewart’s Spencer debuted modestly with $2.1 million on a limited rollout.

Of course, true fans know that the real battle this week was between Antlers and Last Night In Soho, the Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen of box office charts (if Hamilton and Verstappen were fighting over last place). The two movies opened with the same amount of money last week, and this week they remain relatively neck-and-neck: Antlers made a cool $2 million, while Soho fell back to $1.8 million. Nothing that can’t be overcome, especially with Soho’s wider rollout, but we look forward to keeping an eye on this thrilling battle for weeks to come.

As always, this data comes from Box Office Mojo. Head over there to see a more detailed breakdown of the numbers. The full top 10 is below.

• Eternals
• Dune
• No Time To Die
• Venom: Let There Be Carnage
• Ron’s Gone Wrong
• The French Dispatch
• Halloween Kills
• Spencer
• Antlers
• Last Night In Soho