Box Office: 'Wonder Woman' Is About To Cross $600 Million Worldwide

Gal Gadot in 'Wonder Woman'

Warner Bros.

Another day, another Wonder Woman box office update. Yeah, I know, but this is one of the happiest box office stories this side of The Sixth Sense or Get Out, so I'm going to milk it for as long as I can.

The film has earned $5.45 million on its 19th day of domestic theatrical release (+13% from Monday, -38% from last Tuesday), bringing its domestic total to $285.354m thus far. That puts it over the $282m domestic gross of The Matrix Reloaded (in 2D and back in 2003), and it means the Gal Gadot origin story will be topping Henry Cavill's Superman origin story ($291m in 2013) today or tomorrow. Oh, and with $305m overseas as of Monday (so $590.54m worldwide plus whatever it made overseas on Tuesday), it'll probably cross $600m worldwide today or super-duper-early tomorrow. So yeah, just maybe, we can stop trying to find reasons to turn the movie into a victim?

This is something I've discussed before, but it came to a head yesterday when the entire Internet ran with a completely insane stat stating that Cavill had been paid $14 million to play Superman in Man of Steel while Gal Gadot had only received $300,000 for Wonder Woman. Now I don't have the exact numbers, but I'm told that both Cavill and Gadot got paid essentially the same for their respective first starring vehicles and that Gadot possibly got a little bit more (and Amy Adams certainly got more than Cavill for Man of Steel). Now the gender (and racial/ethnic) pay gap is a real thing in essentially every single professional industry, but did anyone ever stop and think about if that number made any sense at all?

Brendan Fraser, coming off The Mummy and George of the Jungle, got $12.5 million for The Mummy Returns in 2001. Daniel Radcliffe got around $20m per movie for the last two Harry Potter films. Jennifer Lawrence got $500,000 for the first Hunger Games and then got $10m for Catching Fire. Does it pass the smell test that a relatively untested actor, even one with an acclaimed TV show (The Tudors) and a solid action fantasy hit (Immortals) to his credit, would get $14m, or 28x what Robert Downey Jr. was paid for the first Iron Man, to play Superman in the first installment of a possible franchise?

Sure enough, this story was garbage, and the day's worth of retractions and rebuttals gave proof to Helen Mirren's great State of Play line about how a false news story is worth more than a true story. Moreover, it's the latest in a long line of stories attempting to create controversy by portraying the Wonder Woman movie not as a champion but as a victim. You've heard these non-controversies before, whether it's alleged horror over Gadot's lack of armpit hair, would-be offense at the film being promoted with ThinkThin protein bars (along with a Nascar tie-in and various other product placements that went less reported), or an arbitrary outrage (which was then repeated sans analysis) over the film's lack of saturation-level marketing five weeks before release, or right before the saturation campaign kicked into gear.

With the caveat that those initially concerned about the marketing were A) writers I tend to agree with, and B) coming from a place of genuine fear that WB was going to undersell the first big-budget female superhero movie since Catwoman and then blame the box office whiff on lady superheroes, everything went off without a hitch here. We got the trailers debuting during the major awards shows and during various DC TV shows, a deluge of TV spots in the last three weeks prior to release, Chris Pine hosting Saturday Night Live, a timely Entertainment Weekly cover story, tie-ins with Nascar, an early social media embargo, and a comparatively early review embargo that flooded the web with positive reviews and white-hot buzz right before go-time.

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Oh, and the insane controversy over Alamo Drafthouse's "women only" screenings (various sexist online trolls reacting in a sexist way to a female-friendly happening is not news) helped keep the film in the national news and helped make it that much more of a pop culture event, but Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. arguably couldn't plan for that "lucky" break. And yeah, they also had the movie, which they had to know (or at least hope) would click once critics sounded the alarms and once paying audiences got a taste of the goods. And, quite frankly, that's exactly what happened just as it did with Frozen (another female-led movie that got beaned for its spoiler-free marketing prior to release). The film has the kind of legs you just don't see outside of the Oscar season and with Disney fairy tales and kid-powered animated movies.

It's on its way to possibly being the leggiest $100 million+ opener ever, the leggiest comic book superhero movie of all time and (definitely) the biggest movie directed by a (solo) female director of all time here and abroad (even adjusted for inflation in the States). Yet even after it opened, would-be controversies and outrages continued. The word that Patty Jenkins hadn't been signed for a (purely theoretical) Wonder Woman 2 spawned new would-be outrage, as if that wasn't entirely normal in the franchise world (and as if announcing and dating Wonder Woman 2 before the first film was released would have been seen as an example of Fantastic Four/Terminator: Genysis-like hubris). And now, yesterday, the Internet took the ball and ran with the insane, implausible and indeed false notion that Henry Cavill had been paid 46x more than Gal Gadot for their first respective superhero origin story movies.

Wonder Woman is about to cross $600 million worldwide, which makes it (by far) the most successful female-led comic book superhero movie ever made. And, give or take where it ends up, it may end its run as one of the very biggest female-led action movies of all time, behind the last two Star Wars movies and whichever Twilight or Hunger Games movies it can't quite catch. It has earned rave reviews and become the outright event movie of the summer, saving the DC Films universe in the process and making Justice League both less essential and more anticipated than it otherwise might have been. Heck, its huge summer legs and pop culture relevance have redeemed the summer season as a place for genuinely big movies. The marketing worked, the promotion worked and the movie worked. Moreover, unlike too many recent female-driven movies (Rough NightResident Evil: The Final ChapterUnforgettableQueen of KatweMiss Sloane, etc.), audiences actually showed up and supported this female-starring/female-directed major studio release.

It is a rare unmitigated triumph in an era where we need all the wins we can get. We don't need a clickbait media environment trying to turn the most powerful woman in the world into a damsel in distress.

