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Iron Man 3 made its heavily anticipated debut in North American theaters yesterday. Consumers on this side of the Atlantic followed the lead of the rest of the world in rushing to theaters to celebrate the de facto sequel to The Avengers. In the process, the Disney/Marvel film engulfed the competition. Iron Man 3 behaved like a box office black hole, mercilessly devouring the other films in the release.

With a $68.3 million Friday, including $15.6 million of Thursday sneaks, Robert Downey Jr.’s latest action flick ruled movie theaters with an iron fist (so to speak). If you went to see one of the top ten domestic releases yesterday, there was an 87% chance that you watched Iron Man 3. The difference between first and second place on Friday was $66 million or, as Larry Miller once noted, the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it. Suffice to say that the dreary first four months of 2013 at the movies are over. There is finally something to get excited about.

The terrible run of 2013 releases ended yesterday with the release of Iron Man 3. In grossing $68.3 million, the latest Marvel superhero title has already become one of the 10 biggest hits of 2013. To wit, that total surpasses the entire domestic run of A Good Day to Die Hard, which has grossed $67,252,596 to date. By the end of today, Iron Man 3 will approach/surpass the domestic tally of G.I. Joe Retaliation, $117,482,316. You see where I am going with this line of thinking. By the end of Sunday, the latest Tony Stark movie will likely slot in third place for 2013 domestic box office. It could feasibly even finish in second if its weekend behavior mirrors The Avengers, a scenario I consider unlikely but cannot dismiss out of hand now that Disney has indoctrinated children into the Marvel world.

No matter what happens next, Iron Man 3 has already more than doubled the previous single best day of 2013 box office. It is a mortal lock to claim the top three box office days of 2013 by close of business Sunday. BOP has meticulously chronicled the ascension of the Marvel universe from the moment that Kevin Feige announced the intention to build toward The Avengers. We exhaustively described the genius of Disney purchasing Marvel for $4 billion in 2009. Our site noted last year that the $1.5 billion earned by The Avengers in combination with the incomprehensible volume of Marvel toy sales had already gone a long way in capitalizing Disney’s investment. With Iron Man 3 clearly headed toward another billion dollars in box office revenue, those statements stand, only now they should include multiple exclamation points. In leveling up the Marvel movie universe, Disney has secured their ability to release bi-annual tent-pole releases to solidify the movie portion of their business.

How do we place the Iron Man 3 performance in immediate context? Let’s consider the domestic movie slump first. At the start of business yesterday, data from 122 days of calendar 2013 box office had been collated. The list of films that could claim a $10 million day of movie revenue was shockingly low. Only 12 titles could boast of that sort of revenue. The modest hits of 2013 under this criteria are 42, The Croods, Evil Dead, G.I. Joe Retaliation, A Good Day to Die Hard, Identity Thief, Jack the Giant Slayer, Mama, Oblivion, Olympus Has Fallen, Oz the Great and Powerful, and Texas Chainsaw 3D.

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