Marvel’s Eternals is only heading into its third week on release, but is already surging towards being one of the top five domestic movie releases of the year having passed the $300 million mark at the global box office, making it the seventh-highest U.S. grosser of 2021 just behind Daniel Craig’s long-delayed Bond finale, No Time To Die. While the critics and some audience reviews have been less than spectacular, it clearly is going to take a lot more than a bit of bad publicity to derail the Marvel train, which just seems to keep on chugging along.

Eternals was one of the unknown entities in Phase 4 of the MCU, with its cast of new characters, galactic Celestials and seemingly very few links to anything that has gone before in the Marvel story. However, Marvel Studio’s boss Kevin Feige had already announced that this Phase is all about new beginnings, and he certainly wasn’t wrong when it came to Eternals. With a huge ensemble cast of Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Angelina Jolie, Don Lee, and even features a cameo appearance from Harry Styles, bringing so many characters to screen in one movie is no mean feat, but it also means that story is constantly moving to give them all equal screen time.

The film currently has the lowest rating of any Marvel movie on Rotten Tomatoes, including the much-maligned Thor: The Dark World, but that doesn’t seem to have made any difference to fans of the Cinematic Universe which just continues to grow and expand like nothing else ever seen in the history of cinemas. With Spider-Man: No Way Home heading our way in December and looking to round out the year with a mega-hit for Feige and Co., it is almost like theaters are very quickly getting back to something like normality. How Spidey fares at the box office will be the biggest indicator of just how far audience willingness to return for the big screen experience in the last few months.

When it comes to the box office numbers of Eternals, the film has surpassed $120 million domestically and has overtaken the Ryan Reynolds vehicle Free Guy, which was released in August, and No Time To Die which arrived at the beginning of October. With Daniel Craig’s final Bond outing now available on digital release and pulling in minimal additional box office profit, Eternals is going to easily take over it to claim sixth place on the year’s biggest domestic movie list and could climb even higher in a chart that has been dominated by the Marvel world.

Although two years ago Marvel was crowing about Spider-Man: Far From Home, which just debuted its second trailer, breaking the $1 billion mark, a first for any Spider-Man movie, in post-pandemic terms $300 million is almost the current equivalent considering only 10 movies have so far grossed more than $100 million in the U.S. When we ever see a movie come anywhere close to pre-pandemic figures is something no one knows, and while it will happen at some point, for now just having the ability to see these movies on the big screen is enough for some.

This news comes via Box Office Pro.