The Batman has finally hit theaters, and —surprising no one — it has successfully claimed the best opening weekend and the biggest international industry opening of 2022 thus far, making $248.5 million in its first three days globally. The Matt Reeves' directed superhero crime epic has become the biggest opening weekend for Warner Brothers since the Joker in 2019, and it's Warner Bros' best pandemic international opening, excluding China.
Other international highlights include the film being Warner Bros' best opening of the pandemic era in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Australia. It also had the second-best pandemic opening in Asia. On top of that, The Batman is currently the #1 film in 73 of the 74 territories it has opened in, and right now, the 74 territories make up 80% of the current overall international box office. The film opened on a massive number of over 30,000 screens, and this success is very impressive given that The Batman does not open in China until March 18th and in Japan on March 11th.
IMAX was a significant contributing factor to the film's international success, opening on 320 screens in the 74 international territories and bringing in $7.3 million. This is the biggest global IMAX weekend of 2022 and the second biggest since December 2019. In four markets, the film even had the biggest DC weekend for IMAX in Sweden, Belgium, Argentina, and Curaçao. The film is currently tracking ahead of Godzilla vs. Kong, Justice League, The Dark Knight, Wonder Woman and is only slightly behind The Dark Knight Rises.
As previously reported, The Batman has made $128.5 million in its domestic opening weekend, making it the largest opening in 2022 in the United States. This also makes it the only one of two films since December 2019 to open to over $100 million in the US. IMAX made up an impressive $15 million of that total, and the film made a killing in top market cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Dallas, and San Francisco.
This has also become Reeves' largest opening weekend ever, both internationally and domestically. On top of that, the box office was likely helped by excellent critical scores and audience reactions across all major media sites, including CinemaScore, where the critics' score is at an A- and the audience score is at an A for the age group of 18 to 24-year-olds. Rotten Tomatoes also has a strong 85% critics rating and a 90% audience rating.
All these achievements and milestones further prove that the movie-going experience is far from dead. When you have a killer marketing campaign and a studio that puts in the effort to make the best film and write the best story possible, these are the kind of results you should get. This is much cause for celebration, and in a world that thought they did not need another Batman movie, this film blew our Bat-Socks off. It presented a uniquely dark detective thriller crime story with hints of romance that made us want to see it again despite the nearly three-hour run time. This is all reflected in the box office, and it is an excellent sign for the rest of the 2022 movie season. Like the Joker before it, this will most likely be WB's next billion-dollar film. People are eager to go back to the movies because of films like this!
The Batman is now playing in theaters.