“The Avengers” is a hit. Are you surprised? The movie’s weekend gross — $200 million — easily surpassed the previous opening weekend record, for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2” ($169 million) last summer. Fifty-two percent of the “Avengers” take came from 3-D showings, according to Box Office Mojo, and 8 percent of those showings came from IMAX screens (presumably as poorly presented as the ones in the Boston area, where mis-framing lopped the foreheads off the main characters).
What does this mean? That five years of hardcore studio marketing plus a film that delivers on enough of that marketing’s promise has paid off. Nothing more and nothing less. Because the Hollywood hype machinery becomes more powerfully efficient with every passing year, it’s almost guaranteed that this record will fall soon enough, maybe even when “The Dark Knight Rises” comes out in late July. When all is said and done, a record opening weekend is now a non-event, but bully for Marvel and Disney for making a decent movie and selling the living hell out of it.
Less of a non-event, though, and barely noticed in the noise of the “Avengers” victory lap, was the death on Friday of Adam Yauch of cancer at 47. Yes, he was a Beastie Boy; yes, he fought for your right to party. He also, in 2008, formed a company called Oscilloscope Pictures and started distributing movies that no one else would touch. Without him, films like the Oscar-nominated Woody Harrelson drama “The Messenger,” the brilliant Banksy prankumentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” the staggering Holocaust archival project “A Film Unfinished,” Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy” and “Meek’s Cutoff,” and the controversial Tilda Swinton drama “We Need to Talk About Kevin” likely wouldn’t have seen the light of theater and home screens. Yauch and his partner, David Fenkel, brought us the dark Chilean psycho-drama “The Maid,” the cauterizing revolution-in-the-streets documentary “Burma VJ,” So Yong Kim’s wrenching “Treeless Mountain,” and the uncategorizable, very wonderful “Bellflower.” Oscilloscope dug up “The Dragon Painter,” a long-lost silent film by the early Hollywood heartthrob Sessue Hayakawa and put it out on DVD.
In other words, Yauch and his company were a force for everything movies can be and should try to be, as opposed to “The Avengers,” which is only what most people think movies are. Does the fact that “Bellflower” made a grand total of $167,000 in theaters — less than .1 percent of what “The Avengers” raked in during its first three days — make it the lesser experience? Of course not; it just means the movie spoke to a smaller constituency that values director Evan Glodell’s freshly anarchic way of seeing the world and that finds more meaning in the collapse of a hero’s youthful certainty than in the umpteenth destruction of New York City onscreen.
Yauch knew that it’s the small, weird, unheralded movies — the labors of love and maxed-out credit cards — that seed the future, and that you can only eat so many cinematic cheeseburgers before you begin to choke on the fat. That while the studios’ bread and circuses may conquer the multiplex, the kinds of films he loved could slip under the radar and reach us where we live: via the arthouse or on our TV screens, streaming onto our laptops and even our phones. Better yet, he put his money on it.
There’s room for all kinds of films and all kinds of audiences, small, medium, and gargantuan. Still, it’s sadly ironic that on the weekend that saw the triumph of Marvel’s will, we lost a man who was dedicated to shattering expectations rather than box-office records. Whose movies will we remember in 25, 50, 100 years? Bet on the ones with people in them, not cartoon characters.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.