With the huge opening weekend of Avengers Infinity War earning over $200 million  Disney now officially has the top 10 biggest opening weekends in theaters of all time. This may come as a surprise to many but it makes sense once you think about it. It all really comes down to how they advertise their movies with nostalgia. If you look at the list you will notice each movie is a sequel or follow up to a older movie.

A perfect example of this is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the 7th entry into the Star Wars Saga and the second biggest opening week of all time. It’s evident that this movie prospered because of nostalgia for Star Wars movies.  While the trailers were being released for the movie you didn’t hear people that often talk about the new things they saw but more about things from then older movies. For example, when fans saw that Harrison Ford will return to play one of the lead roles fans were delighted. So say if fans saw trailers and marketing for the movie with  nothing mentioning past installments to the series there would definitely be less excitement about the whole movie. This is especially true with this film because Disney just purchased Lucas Films and many fans were worried that they would ruin Star Wars so seeing familiar things reasssured the fan base that Disney knew what they were doing.

Avengers Infinity war did well for a very similar reason with by having a very memorable trailer that left viewers with the feeling that this movie is what all other Marvel movies have been building to.  The trailer also showed many fan favorite characters from the past 18 instalments to the series. You didn’t even need to like every character but if you were a huge fan of one you were most likely sold on this movie knowing that it was in a way the final chapter of that story.

The one exception is Beauty and The Beast: unlike the other 9 it’s not a sequel. However nostalgia plays a huge part in the movie’s success. Many parents show their kids at a very young age the original animated film Beauty and The Beast which many consider a great classic and what the 2017 live action movie was based on. Many of those kids are teenagers now and want to relive those good memories.

All of this is not to say a new series from Disney would be bad but it would most likely not end up in the top 10 opening weekend list because people don’t always have faith or excitement for something new because it’s hard to make people excited for something they can’t relate to as much.

Disney has not completely taken the top 10 box office movies yet, but they do however have 5 out of the 10 movies and with Disney gaining more power sooner or later they will take those spots.