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Bruce Hall: When the worst thing you can say is that your film didn't quite make it to $100 million, it was a pretty good weekend.

More important to me at least is how wonderfully well the strategy behind the Marvel films has worked. If you begin with Iron Man in 2008, none of the seven (by my count, anyway) Avengers related movies have opened to under $50 million, none have failed to break $100 million domestically and each has made at least a quarter billion dollars worldwide.

Think about that. Five years. Seven movies. One (big) franchise. By building interest in films that all build interest in each other, the brains behind this operation have discovered a way to basically release a sequel of some kind every year (sometimes twice a year) and still maintain a very steep upward profit trajectory. Pursued as their own individual franchises, one or more of the Iron Man, Thor, Captain America or Hulk franchises might have run out of gas on their own by now (I’m looking at you, big green guy). But by creating an environment where a common story arc unites them into one mega franchise, Disney and Marvel may have just created the world’s largest and most lucrative pay per view network.

In your face, HBO.

And beginning with this so-called “Marvel Phase 2”, they’re doing it all over again, and even more successfully. This is the closest thing the world has ever seen to a perpetual motion machine. And it’s only going to get bigger. Then of course, it will become self aware and destroy us all. But until then, we’re all going to have a lot of fun and Disney is going to make more money than God.

Max Braden: What strikes me is how well the Avengers solo movies are doing, while the Wolverine movies have faltered. It may be that although The Avengers movie was record-breaking because it grouped the team together, the franchise works as solo movies as well because everyone has their own favorite they can support. The X-Men franchise, despite a big fan base for the Wolverine, Ironsides, and Gandalf the Evil characters, seems to work best in ensemble settings. I haven't really enjoyed any of the solo Avengers outside Iron Man, but i fully support others enjoying the movies about the man in the silly cape so that the money keeps coming in and funding more Iron Man movies.

David Mumpower: This is the perfect moment to remind our readers that Disney paid $4 billion for Marvel. With the weekend's results, the combined box office of The Avengers, Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World is over $3 billion. And I again want to stress that these numbers are a drop in the bucket compared to toy sales. Imagine how shrill your kids will get when Avengers rides start showing up at Disney amusement parks, too.

With regards to the opening weekend of Thor: The Dark World, I will say that we sometimes fall victim to jaded analysis of such massive debuts. They happen so frequently each year that we do not always appreciate them enough. Here is a point I want to make about Thor. The sequel increased 30% from the original. Yes, there is an expectation for stronger opening weekends for sequels but a 30% bump is massive relative to scale. Star Trek Into Darkness, for example, actually declined 11% from its extremely well received reboot. The Dark Knight Rises managed only $2.4 million more on opening weekend than The Dark Knight (although there were extenuating circumstances). If Catching Fire delivered similar behavior in terms of percentage increase on opening weekend, we would be facing a $198 million weekend. These sort of bumps are not impossible (the second Twilight movie being a notable example) but they are wildly infrequent. The cause here is what everyone has stated. The Avengers was like a mushroom and Thor and Iron Man were like Mario and Luigi, eating their veggies then swelling in size.

Kim Hollis: What Disney has accomplished with the Marvel/Avengers universe is simply amazing. If someone had told me three years ago that a sequel to Thor featuring the guy who played Captain Kirk's dad would make almost $90 million, I would have laughed in their face. The unlikeliest characters have been turned into cultural touchstones for a generation of kids. Iron Man is an alcoholic who comes off as a fascist in some of the comic books. Thor is just a silly character and it feels like Sam Raimi should have created a camp series a la Hercules to highlight him. And Captain America should be a guy who theoretically only works in the United States, yet the first film actually managed to approach $200 million overseas. A Hulk movie with Ruffalo would probably kill because now that he's been set up properly, he's the character kids especially love. Disney practically has their own money printing press at this point.

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