Deadpool & Wolverine Breaks The Passion Of The Christ's R-Rated Box Office Record

In 1966, The Beatles' John Lennon stirred outrage around the world when he proclaimed in an interview: "We're more popular than Jesus now." It's fortunate that Wade Wilson (a.k.a. Deadpool, a.k.a Mr. Pool) isn't afraid to live life on the edge, because together with his mutant pal Wolverine, he can now make the same claim.

Per Deadline, "Deadpool & Wolverine" has overtaken Mel Gibson's ultra-violent 2004 Biblical tale "The Passion of the Christ" to become the highest-grossest R-rated movie of all time at the domestic box office. The superhero team-up movie has a running total of $396.6 million domestic and $428.5 million internationally, for a global total of $824.1 million through Sunday. After just 10 days in theaters, it has already surpassed both previous "Deadpool" movies and its membership in the billion-dollar box office club is looking like an inevitability.

There are a couple of caveats here, the first of which is to note that "Deadpool & Wolverine" still only ranks at No. 3 on the worldwide all-time charts for R-rated movies. Second place is held by "Oppenheimer" ($975.2 million) and "Joker" has the top spot with $1.078 billion. Secondly, the $370 million grossed by "The Passion of the Christ" in 2004 is equivalent to around $615 million in 2024. So, Jesus is still substantially more popular than Deadpool and Wolverine when adjusting for inflation.

As "Deadpool & Wolverine" breaks one box office record after another, it's easy to forget that R-rated superhero movies were considered a complete non-starter up until recently. 1997's "Spawn," which was based on a series of dark horror comics, had numerous scenes cut from the theatrical release to shave its original R rating down to PG-13. "The key to the movie being a success is that it maintains a PG-13 rating but retains its darkness," New Line Cinema's then-president Michael DeLuca told the LA Times while "Spawn" was still in production.

Studio abhorrence of seeing the words "R-rated" and "superhero" in the same sentence kept "Deadpool" in development hell for years. It was only when test footage was leaked, to a rave response from Marvel fans, that the movie was begrudgingly given the green light by Fox — though not before the studio slashed the budget down to $58 million, forcing some script rewrites. It went on to gross a staggering $782.6 million at the box office, exposing a starved appetite for adult-oriented comic book fare among moviegoers.

A few months after "Deadpool" raked in that mountain of cash, filming began on Wolverine's latest solo movie "Logan," and producer Simon Kinberg confirmed it was being shot with an R-rated script. "Logan" made its own cash mountain, and a couple of years later "Joker" became the first R-rated movie to gross $1 billion worldwide. It took a while for studios to consider the possibility that superhero movies could be for grown-ups too, but the lesson has definitely kicked in hard now.