Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 Dethrones The Super Mario Bros. Movie With $282 Million Opening Weekend

The box office numbers are in for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and unsurprisingly, the gang's final ride is doing some impressive business across the globe with an opening haul of $282 million. In line with early estimates, $114 million came from the domestic US market and overseas ticket sales accounted for $168.1 million according to Box Office Mojo.

While Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 fell a few million short behind The Super Mario Bros. Movie's $137 million domestic three-day opening weekend, it did dethrone the Nintendo icons from their top spot at the box office, which the Illumination-animated film had held firmly onto for five weeks.

Guardians Vol. 3 is still comfortably ahead of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania's $104 million US opening, and compared to previous films in the series, it has surpassed the domestic opening weekend of the original Guardians movie ($94.3 million). Guardian's Vol. 2 still has the biggest opening domestic weekend of the trilogy, at $146 million, but Thursday showings in the US were a franchise best for the threequel.

"At the heart of the film is Rocket's backstory from his time under the High Evolutionary's care, which we see play out in flashbacks while he's unconscious in the present," Phil Owens' wrote in GameSpot's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 review. "It's the best stuff in the film, no question--it's very emotional and messed up in all the ways it needs to be… But outside of these flashbacks, there's just something missing."

Marvel's next big film arrives in June, although this one isn't MCU-related. The highly anticipated Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is the first of two sequels to the hit 2018 animated film and pits Miles Morales against an entire multiverse of Spider-Men.