Box office hits and misses: Deadpool buries Risen and kills The Witch

For the second straight week, Deadpool topped the box-office rankings, beating all of this week’s new releases and returning films — including a pair of movies that hail from very opposite sides of the religious spectrum. Neither the Christian resurrection drama Risen nor the demonic period-piece thriller The Witch came close to meeting the $55 million earned by Deadpool over the weekend, despite both films’ premieres exceeding box-office pundits’ predictions.

On Saturday, Deadpool moved past the $200 million mark domestically, and by the end of the weekend it had become the most successful movie domestically in the entire X-Men universe for studio 20th Century Fox. The film’s $235.4 million tally so far put it past 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, which had been the previous record-holder among the eight X-Men (and X-Men spinoff) films produced by the studio so far.

Deadpool also moved past 300 over the weekend to become the highest-grossing “R”-rated movie based on a comic book among domestic releases.

As for the weekend’s new releases, Risen continued the trend of faith-based films enjoying good opening weekends. Most box-office prognosticators expect that the film — which casts Joseph Fiennes as a Roman tribune investigating the Biblical resurrection of Jesus — will stay strong right through the Easter holiday. The film’s $11.8 million opening is also right up there among the best debuts of any faith-based films over the years, so it will likely be sticking around.

It was a good weekend for The Witch, too, which pulled in $8.7 million for its arthouse horror film about a Puritan family who may or may not have a devil in its midst. The ultra-creepy film was riding quite a bit of buzz into its premiere weekend, and the studio is probably very happy with the film’s debut numbers and audience reviews, which trended very positive.

The only other new release to make it into the top ten was Race, which cast Selma actor Stephan James as Olympian Jesse Owens. The biopic of the American track-and-field star opened to very positive reviews from critics and audiences alike, and earned modest $7.3 million.

It’s worth noting that Star Wars: The Force Awakens continues to chug along in the top ten, inching closer and closer to the second-place film in the all-time worldwide box-office rankings. The Force Awakens is now approximately $146 million shy of the total earnings for James Cameron’s Titanic, which is quite the feat, given that the Star Wars sequel has only been in theaters 10 weeks so far.

Next weekend features the release of feel-good Olympic comedy Eddie the Eagle, as well as the effects-driven Gods of Egypt, and the crime thriller Triple 9. None of the films are expected to knock Deadpool out of the top spot.