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Furious 7 breaks box office records with explosive opening weekend

Furious 7 breaks box office records with explosive opening weekend

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New movie becomes the ninth biggest opening of all time

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The recently released Furious 7 isn't just the most ridiculous entry in the fourteen-year-old Fast and Furious franchise — it's also become by far the biggest opening weekend earner in the entire series. This weekend saw Furious 7 take $384 million worldwide, with $143.6 million of that coming from the domestic audience. That makes it not only the biggest April opening weekend of all time — previous record holder Captain America: The Winter Soldier got a comparatively paltry $95 million — but the ninth biggest opening weekend of all time.

To put that in perspective, that's more than every single movie in the Twilight saga, more than Sony's first Spider-Man movie, and far more than every single Star Wars movie got on their first weekends. Furious 7's domestic launch was the biggest since 2013's The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the sixth biggest movie launch in US history, which raked in $158 million on its first weekend.

Furious 7 got more money than every single Twilight movie

The rest of the top ten is dominated by superhero movies — fitting, given that Furious 7 follows exactly the same template. The newest movie is certainly bigger and brasher than previous outings (amazing such a thing was actually possible), but keeping track of fifteen years of increasingly wacky antics from Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, and the sadly departed Paul Walker was a tricky task for first-time Furious director James Wan. The result is a bit of a mess, redeemed somewhat by skydiving cars, constant affirmations of family and friendship, and The Rock flexing so hard that he sloughs a protective cast off his arm.

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