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For the 19th consecutive day, The Avengers was the number one movie in North America. With Men in Black III waiting in the wings, there is true competition for day number 22. Until then, The Marvel superheroes continue to toy with the competition. Its $4.92 million take yesterday more than the combined total of the second and third place “contenders,” Battleship and Dictator.

Since The Avengers is still the story, today represents the perfect opportunity to update its current status. With $468.27 million, Joss Whedon’s latest masterpiece has entered the top five in all-time domestic revenue. By this time tomorrow, it will have surpassed Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace to become the number four movie domestically. The question is how much higher The Avengers will go with, the obvious answer being somewhere above The Dark Knight but below Titanic. This was my evaluation last week, and we will take another look at the data today.

Over the past seven days, The Avengers has earned $78.8 million. That number reflects a 46% decline from the previous Wednesday-Tuesday total of $145.5 million. In other words, Earth’s mightiest heroes continue to demonstrate remarkable legs relative to expectations for tentpole titles.

In last week’s analysis, I mentioned several previous May releases that made respectable comparison models for The Avengers. Those included Iron Man, Spider-Man and Star Trek. Let’s update those evaluations. Since we have already examined the seven-day declines for The Avengers, we should do the same with the others. Star Trek declined 40% on those weekdays while Spider-Man fell 38% and Iron Man dropped 37%. Obviously, The Avengers is declining a bit faster by comparison.

This is expected since its actual box office number is so much higher. While The Avengers managed $78.8 million, the other three blockbusters had an average day 13-19 take of $46.9 million with the highest being $59.9 million. As we have described on countless occasions here at BOP, scale matters when evaluating performance. The Avengers is on a historically unprecedented scale at this point in its release and that is not hyperbole. Consider that Avatar, the number one movie of all time, was “only” at $367.5 million after 19 days. Even The Dark Knight at $405.7 million is over $62 million behind this pace. What The Avengers is doing defies description.

The largest remaining question, however, is how much The Avengers has left. In last week’s Shop Talk, I demonstrated the methodology through which The Avengers was likely to reach the $625 million range. It has slipped behind that pace a bit. The way we know this is by returning to the previous early May releases mentioned above. What we need to do is determine the percentage of each movie’s final box office that had been attained after 19 days in theaters.

Star Trek garnered 75% of its total domestic revenue by day 19. Iron Man had accrued 71.7% of its final take. And Spider-Man was at 72.5%. As you can see from these three May models, The Avengers has probably earned between 70% and 75% of its final take. If this is the case, we can slot its final domestic take between $625 million and $669 million. I am of the opinion that its day 19 take will be a bit lower than this again due to scale. 78% wouldn’t surprise me, which puts it right on the cutoff point for $600 million.

What helps The Avengers is that Memorial Day is this weekend and summer vacation for students begins soon after that. We will track the latter aspect in the coming weeks. For the moment, Memorial Day is the more engaging discussion, though. Let’s again examine the early May releases mentioned above.

Spider-Man fell from $45.0 million in its third weekend of release to $28.5 million over Memorial Day. The trick is that its Monday total on the holiday week was $7.3 million, up $3 million from the previous week’s $4.3 million. In other words, Spider-Man’s four-day total fell from $49.3 million to $35.8 million, a slim decline of 27%. Iron Man behaved similarly. Its four-day Memorial holiday take of $26.1 million was a modest drop of 25% from the previous four-day total of $34.9 million. Star Trek’s numbers were a bit more significant in terms of decline. It fell from $47.6 million to $29.4 million, a 38% drop. This is more attributable to its massive Saturday box office of $18.3 the previous Saturday than anything else. As such, I’m dismissing it as an accurate model.

What should you conclude from the above? I am of the opinion that The Avengers will hold 75% of its business from the most recent Friday-to-Monday period, $61.3 million. That is a Memorial Day four-day tally around $46 million (we’ll see in 48 hours whether Reagen Sulewski agrees with me). If I am correct or even in the ballpark, The Avengers would be sitting at $520 million after next Monday. Assuming this is correct, it should take advantage of summer vacation box office inflation to approach and probably surpass $600 million. This is particularly true if it is well beyond $520 million after next Monday. If it falls short of that mark, I do not believe that we will see our third $600 million domestic performer.