Anti-abortion film “Unplanned” debuts strongly, beats Captain Marvel per screen average

The “R” rated movie landed the second best start ever for the faith-based distributor Pure Flix, raking in $6 million on its first weekend, doubling the $3 million projection.

Given a coveted A+ CinemaScore, Unplanned posted a strong opening weekend in 1059 theaters across the U.S. despite not spending the advertising dollars like bigger Hollywood productions typically do.

“We are thrilled, gratified and humbled,” co-directors Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman said Sunday in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter. “We are so pleased that the American people have responded with such an enormous outpouring of support at the box office. It humbles us and we look forward to seeing what happens in the weeks ahead.”

While most big box office flicks typically gain a big boost from L.A. and New York theaters, Unplanned did most of it’s business in the Midwest and South.

The top theater was the AMC Northpark 15 in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, followed by cinemas in St. Louis; Detroit; Wichita, Kansas; Temecula in Southern California’s Riverside County; Salt Lake City; Orange County, California; Kansas City; Odessa, Texas; and Nashville.

Pulling out an average of $5,770 from each theater, Unplanned topped Captain Marvel by about $650 per screen, despite Captain Marvel‘s $150 million dollar budget.

The film got a big boost in popularity and notoriety thanks to a crackdown on its official Twitter account over the weekend. The account was temporarily suspended on Saturday, sparking a large backlash which led to Twitter reinstating the account, saying it was a mistake on their part.

The @UnplannedMovie account also experienced some weird follower glitches over the weekend with many people on Twitter saying they their “follow” had been reversed and that they were no longer following the account.

This glitch resulted in the account’s follower numbers dropping all the way from 170,000 to 25,000 for a time before be restored back to their original state.

While the “glitches” seem to all be fixed, things are slowing down for Unplanned on Twitter, as the movie now has more than 274,000 followers at the time of writing.

Despite the controversial nature of the film, it seems an increasing number of Americans are interested in at least learning more about what abortion actually looks like in their country.