Mom doesn’t want flowers or a bottle of bubble bath for Mothers’ Day. She wants Captain America’s beard. That’s the takeaway from this weekend, where Avengers: Infinity War easily topped the domestic charts for the third weekend in a row with $61.8 million, beating the week’s two new wide releases: Melissa McCarthy’s Life Of The Party, and Gabrielle Union’s Breaking In. And the U.S. is just a small part of the overall picture for the Marvel Studios tentpole, which made an additional $200 million this weekend in China, the second-largest opening of all time in the increasingly important international market.
Not that either of this year’s mom-centric Mother’s Day offerings did terribly. McCarthy, who’s had a nice little family business going with husband Ben Falcone in the past few years—this is the third of McCarthy’s films directed by Falcone, and co-written by the husband-wife team—usually sees her star vehicles open in the top three, and Life Of The Party kept that streak going with a No. 2, $18.5 million debut. That’s $5 million less than 2016's The Boss and $3 million less than 2014's Tammy, both of which also opened in the competitive summer movie season, however. And with an estimated production budget of $30 million and limited overseas prospects, it looks like McCarthy won’t be quitting her day job of appearing in other people’s big-budget studio comedies any time soon.
As for the “mama lioness” end of the Mother’s Day spectrum, Gabrielle Union’s Breaking In more than doubled its $6 million production budget with a $16.5 million, third place bow. It’s yet another reminder not to underestimate Will Packer, producer of Girls Trip, Think Like A Man, and the Ride Along movies: Packer, whose films are frequently aimed at black audiences—and consistently outperform the low expectations set for them by studios—told Forbes back in March that he doesn’t mind working in the mid-budget range (“when nobody expects much, it’s a whole lot easier to come out of nowhere”) but that “if I’m given the resources, I can compete. I just want to be able to compete with my peers on the same level.”
In the smaller arena of limited release, this week’s big winner was Ruth Bader Ginsberg documentary RBG, which cracked the top 10 this week as it expanded into an additional 146 theaters. That puts it just behind Marvel’s old reliable Black Panther (No. 9, $1.9 million) as it continues its slow rollback from theaters, and perhaps the most disappointing of this year’s maternal May releases: Tully, the reunion of Young Adult’s Charlize Theron, Diablo Cody, and Jason Reitman that opened soft at No. 6 last week and fell to No. 8 this week with $2.2 million, an average of $1,652 in each of its 1,356 theaters.
For more detailed numbers, visit Boxofficemojo.