‘Deadpool’ on pace to break Presidents Day weekend box office records

“Deadpool,” Marvel Entertainment’s loud, lewd and decidedly R-rated superhero movie, is well on its way to setting a new record for the biggest Presidents Day weekend debut.

The action comedy took in $47.5 million on Friday, including $12.7 million from its Thursday night preview showings. That total puts the film on track for a three-day opening of $120 million and a four-day haul north of $130 million.

To say that the movie, starring Ryan Reynolds as a cynical mercenary who undergoes an operation that gives him super-fast healing powers (and also leaves him looking, in his own words, like “a testicle with teeth”), opened beyond expectations is an understatement.

Distributor 20th Century Fox had conservatively forecast “Deadpool” to gross between $60 million and $65 million. Instead it looks like it will easily pass the record $93 million total that “Fifty Shades of Grey” earned last year.

Opening-night audiences gave the movie an A grade, per the market research firm Cinemascore. Males made up 57% of the opening audience.

Last week’s No. 1 movie, DreamWorks’ animated “Kung Fu Panda 3,” looks to finish the weekend in second place with a projected four-day total of $26 million.

“Panda” will probably finish ahead of the weekend’s other two wide-release debuts -- the comedies “How to Be Single” and “Zoolander 2,” both of which debuted below expectations.

“How to Be Single,” following four New York women looking for love (or some approximation of it), took in $5 million Friday, putting it on track for $18 million to $20 million for the four-day weekend. The R-rated movie, starring Dakota Johnson and Rebel Wilson, didn’t fare particularly well with critics, and audiences gave it a middling B grade, per Cinemascore. Women were overwhelmingly its biggest patrons, buying 82% of the tickets.

“Zoolander 2,” meanwhile, fared even worse with critics and audiences. The Ben Stiller sequel grossed just $4.2 million Friday, putting it on track for about $15 million for the holiday weekend. The film scored just a 35 on movie review aggregator Metacritic and inspired some brutal dismissals, including veteran film critic Leonard Maltin writing that he left the movie halfway through. Moviegoers weren’t much kinder, giving “Zoolander 2” a C-plus grade, according to Cinemascore.

Twitter: @glennwhipp