You’ve heard of passing the baton? Well, Luke’s passing the lightsaber.
Like other recent Marvel movies, Avengers: Infinity War will likely dominate the box office for weeks to come after crushing multiple records — including the opening weekend record ( $257.70 million) previously set by Star Wars: The Force Awakens ($247.96 million) in December 2015. One might imagine that the news arrived as a blow to a few egos in a galaxy far, far away, but that isn’t the case. At least, not outwardly, and in the game of healthy competition, Lucasfilm has now duly passed the baton to Marvel.
That is, Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber has been passed to Iron Man’s gauntlet. In doing so, the Star Wars Twitter account, on behalf of Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy, extended a congratulatory tweet to the Avengers for Hulk-busting the opening weekend record.
While this new opening weekend record will be broken anytime soon — indeed, it might be a full year before that happens by the hands of the next Avengers movie — Lucasfilm also has plenty of coin to look forward to in the near future with the May 25 release of Solo: A Star Wars Story, which should fare exceedingly well, regardless of landing in theaters a mere week after 20th Century Fox’s Deadpool 2. Yet the real winners here are fans, who remain emotionally invested enough to keep watching these franchises until the end.
