Fantastic Four's box office drop proves Marvel is losing average moviegoers

USA Today

3 days ago

Marvel Studios might be staring down the endgame for its cinematic universe as we know it.
With The Fantastic Four: First Steps estimated for a difficult 66-percent box office drop from its respectable opening weekend of $118 million domestic, the comic book movie giant has watched its 2025 strategy lose some of the core audience that cemented the MCU as appointment viewing for years... the average moviegoers.
Right now, Marvel most likely won't have one of its films situated within the top five of domestic earners at the box office for the first time since 2011 (excluding 2020, of course), just looking at Box Office Mojo.
REVIEW: The Fantastic Four: First Steps plays it too safe to get it just right
After running Hollywood for the better part of 15 years and change, Marvel is stuck with all three of 2025 films likely falling behind their peers in domestic box office competition. February's Captain America: Brave New World (roughly $200 million) suffered from lackluster reviews and a convoluted fit into the grander storyline, while May's Thunderbolts* (roughly $190 million) boasted good reviews but lacked marquee characters casual fans knew about.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps should outgross both of those films domestically when it's all said and done, but it's unlikely to top the ultimate grosses of films like A Minecraft Movie (roughly $424 million), Lilo & Stitch (roughly $421 million and counting), Jurassic World: Rebirth (roughly $311 million and counting), Superman (roughly $306 million and counting) and even April's surprise horror hit Sinners (roughly $278 million), an original project. New films await.
The new Fantastic Four film earned good notices from critics, but the substantial drop shows that, once the big fans got in their viewings during opening weekend, there weren't as many casual moviegoers left waiting to see the new MCU project as in years past. This is the third time this year that a Marvel film has shown an inability to leg out.
With probable global hits like Avatar: Fire and Ash, Wicked: For Good and Zootopia 2 on the horizon, a Marvel film will also possibly miss the top 10 globally at the box office (outside of 2020) for the first time since 2011. The Fantastic Four: First Steps isn't doing big business internationally and is already proving to lack legs stateside.
Compare this film's lukewarm results to 2024's Deadpool & Wolverine, a monster success with two primarily non-MCU characters that grossed roughly $637 million domestically. Marvel's biggest success since 2021's Spider-Man: No Way Home relied on two characters whose previous films were created by other studios under the generic Marvel banner. Both of those films had rampant nostalgia in their corner to go along with big-name characters.
Marvel will next partner with Sony on next July's Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which will reportedly boast Mark Ruffalo's Hulk and Jon Bernthal's Punisher. We're assuming another Tom Holland Spider-Man vehicle will do big business, as will December 2026's Avengers: Doomsday that boasts Robert Downey Jr.'s MCU return.
However, even those big projects lean on past glories to wrangle in the casual moviegoers. This year, a new Captain America in Anthony Mackie, a new anti-hero squad and the MCU's first go at the Fantastic Four all failed to reach past the expected audience. At least one of those films (Captain America) got awful reviews, but none of them really hit the zeitgeist in the way, say, James Gunn's Superman did just a couple of weeks before The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Perhaps that's why Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige hinted that a "reset" awaits his cinematic universe.
Nostalgia can power your film to success, but even Marvel Studios has a finite amount at its disposal. Qualifying the Downey Jr. days of the MCU as nostalgic is dangerous business, as the original grand finale to that run, Avengers: Endgame, only came out about six years ago. If Marvel's best trick up its sleeve is playing the hits to get regular moviegoers off the couch and into the cinema, the studio is going to run out of that goodwill pretty quickly.
Avengers: Doomsday has Downey Jr. going for it, sure, but the film has no narrative payoff on the horizon. The grander MCU storyline post-Endgame has been, to put it mildly, a jumbled mess. The thematic denouement of the Infinity Stones saga was a decade-plus in the making, and the entire globe flocked to see how it concluded. Right now, the next Avengers film seems to be hinging on brand recognition and nostalgia to get audiences to the movies. Unless your wardrobe primarily consists of Marvel t-shirts, can you plot out how this gigantic story has gone lately?
While the next Avengers film will partially work at the box office because brand recognition and nostalgia are still perniciously attractive to a wider audience, you just can't expect the same impact of past Avengers films. The payoff just isn't there to nearly the same degree. Downey Jr. will be the big draw; the new characters compiling the expected Avengers ensemble is a strange hodgepodge of film and television successes and failures. The disastrous rollout of so many Disney+ streaming shows particularly diluted the brand and made the grander story nearly impossible to follow. Again, everything that's happened since Thanos turned to dust has been a gigantic shrug. If Doomsday hits and word spreads of a confusing plot, even an Avengers movie with RDJ can wither on the vine.
You can't say the Marvel Cinematic Universe is dead because the machine will keep turning out just enough of its die hards to pop on opening weekend. However, Disney will only be willing to fund so much MCU content comparative to years past if these movies keep popping up and evaporating the weekend after release.
Big movies need legs. They need to get casual moviegoers interested. For years, Marvel did so with admirable consistency, even if every movie didn't hit a billion dollars globally. Right now, the studio can only rely on yesterday to make tomorrow viable. The new projects aren't working as well as before; the casuals are tuning them out.
Unless a project is directly harping on what's been done before, the golden age of Marvel is probably over by now. In order for there to be even the faint chance of a second one, the studio is going to have to reboot this entire ordeal and simplify all of this for general moviegoers. Until it does, expect more of those big second-weekend drops.
All financial numbers this piece originate from Box Office Mojo.