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Black Panther freezes out Frozen at global box office

Let it go. For the first time in forever, T'Challa and company can say their film is the tenth-highest-grossing worldwide release of all time.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
Gael Cooper

Over the weekend, Marvel's hit Black Panther froze out fellow Disney film Frozen, passing Elsa, Anna and chums to become the tenth-highest-grossing worldwide movie release ever.

As this chart from Box Office Mojo shows, Black Panther has earned $1.27 billion worldwide, behind 2017's Star Wars: The Last Jedi, at $1.33 billion. 2009's Avatar still leads all competitors with $2.78 billion earned worldwide.

It's just another Tuesday in Wakanda for the record-smashing Black Panther, which stars Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa, the mysterious superpowered king of the fictional African nation. 

Black Panther recently passed 2012's The Avengers to become the biggest-grossing superhero film of all time. It won the weekend box-office crown for five straight weekends, before finally falling to Pacific Rim: Uprising. It enjoyed the second-biggest opening weekend for a Marvel Studios film, after The Avengers, and it's only the fourth film to top $100 million in each of its first two weekends.

Don't worry about Anna and Elsa, though, The Arendelle royals long-ago learned how to let it go.

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