Thor grosses $25.7 million on opening Friday, looks headed for $65-72 million debut weekend.

It was pretty much a foregone conclusion once the midnight numbers were released, but Marvel's Thor has opened with a rock-solid $25.7 million for its first Friday. The film is polling at a 'B+' from Cinemascore, with an 'A' from audiences under 18. The film did about 12% of that from midnight showings, which is normal for such fare. Where it goes from here is an open question of course. Non-sequels that did the 12% of their Friday grosses on midnight or Thursday night (Avatar and Inception for example) had weekend multipliers of about 2.8x, which would give Thor a hearty $72 million. But even a slightly front-loaded 2.6x would give the picture $65 million, which still feels like the likely end result for the Fri-Sun period. The other two major openers, Something Borrowed and Jumping the Broom, opened with $4.8 million and $4.1 million respectively, so both should gross around $12 million for the weekend. More to come once the weekend numbers roll in (although my analysis may be a little later than usual, due to the whole Mother's Day celebrations and what-not).

Scott Mendelson