Shang-Chi Surges to Success, Topping F9 Takings

 If there’s a pandemic success story to celebrate, it has been the rise and rise of F9. This week we see Shang-Chi: Legend of the Ten Rings surge to a surprising $70M opening, giving it an opening night that surpasses F9s. Will it be able to sustain the success? We asked Brandon Blake, L.A-based entertainment attorney, to weigh in on this strong opening.


Brandon Blake


It’s been a little over two years since we’ve had a full MCU movie release, and now within short months, we’ve seen 2 of the planned phase 4 films hit the circuit. While Black Widow had a same-day streaming release, Shang-Chi will be a theater exclusively for the next 45 days. It’s a strategy that wasn’t without debate, and Disney has been open in calling this- the first theatrical-only release since the beginning of the pandemic- an experiment. It’s a stance that has earned them some understandable kickback from the stars involved, but the movie does seem to have the meat to carry it to stardom.


How has it been benchmarked against F9? It has taken $1.5m more in opening night preview than F9 but was only predicted to pull in $45M over its opening weekend, vs F9’s $70M. A prediction that went wildly wrong (in all the right ways), with a $71.4M total taking for opening weekend. 


Of course, success isn’t just built on strong opening weekends. Black Widow opened to an $80.3M opening weekend and fell off rapidly. And that was for a story with a hero audience recognized, which Shang-Chi does not have. Yet Shang-Chi has no fallback streaming release to lure people away from the theaters, either. Marvel movies do tend to perform well on opening night as fans flock to avoid spoilers, so we can’t yet predict how front-loaded these figures will be, but it’s certainly an encouraging upswing. Disney will likely use the film as a barometer to decide on the remainder of their 2021 releases, and it may well influence other key box office releases for the rest of the year too.


Will Shang-Chi continue with this benchmark-topping performance? We’ll be watching the situation with interest.

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