The Black Panther box office train keeps on rollin’. The Marvel Studios film bowed to record-breaking numbers last weekend, scoring over $200 million in just three days, and now the film is poised to cross the $500 million mark at the worldwide box office today. The film finished with an MCU-best $14.5 million Wednesday, surpassing The Avengers’ previous Wednesday record of $13.6 million. That is very, very good news as we head into the film’s second weekend of release, where it looks like Black Panther is going to have a very strong hold on the box office throne. Moreover, the film is going to pass the final worldwide gross of Ant-Man ($519 million) in a single week.

With this $500 million marker, Disney as a whole has crossed the $1 billion mark for 2018 in just 52 days. Under CEO Bob Iger’s reign, he’s brought Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm all into the Disney fold, and the result is a 2019 slate that includes Avengers 4, Toy Story 4, Star Wars: Episode IX, and Frozen 2, not to mention highly anticipated live-action remakes of The Lion King, Aladdin, and Dumbo which are sure to soar. So yeah, Disney is sitting pretty.

Back to Black Panther, it’ll be really interesting to see where this movie ends up. Spider-Man: Homecoming is the highest-grossing “inaugural” film for a Marvel character at $880.1 worldwide, but Black Panther is already at $500 million and it hasn’t even opened in Japan or China yet. It doesn’t seem too big of a stretch to imagine it overtaking that total. Moreover, I’m starting to think—domestically at least—Black Panther is going to outgross the May sequel Avengers: Infinity War. It’s already at $277 million heading into its second weekend. Time will tell, but this thing is huge and the numbers aren’t slowing down anytime soon.

For more on Black Panther, peruse our recent coverage in the links below.

black-panther-2-cast
Image via Marvel Studios
black-panther-2-chadwick-boseman
Image via Marvel Studios
black-panther-poster-chadwick-boseman
Image via Marvel Studios