Epoch Watchlist: Recommended Viewing for Aug. 1–7
New Release
'The Fantastic Four: First Steps'
Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn), and Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) face trouble when Earth is threatened by Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his herald, the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner). The Fantastic Four must rely on more than their powers.
The visuals pop but the heart is missing. Sue and Ben get real moments, but most of the others come off flat. The gender swap for Silver Surfer (from the original cartoon) feels forced and adds nothing. The film is a flashy start to a series, but I'm curious to see if future installments are better.
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USA Today
3 hours ago
- USA Today
Fantastic Four's box office drop proves Marvel is losing average moviegoers
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.
New York Post
4 hours ago
- New York Post
‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps' leaps over box office competition
It looks like Marvel's first family has finally found its footing. 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' clobbered the competition and leaped into the No. 1 spot on Friday — its second in theaters — with $11,7 million in earnings, according to The Numbers. The superhero flick, which cost a staggering $200 million, is the second reboot of the 'Fantastic Four' movie franchise and stars Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn as the Marvel Comics foursome. Advertisement The Post said the film 'marks a slight improvement from the preceding trilogy of terror. But Marvel still can't nail what should be one of its premiere attractions.' So far, it's made $170 million domestically, and could take in as much as $198 million by the end of the weekend, according to Variety. 3 Joseph Quinn, Vanessa Kirby and Pedro Pascal star in 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps.' ©Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection Advertisement In second place was the animated comedy 'The Bad Guys 2,' with $9.17 million in sales on Friday, its opener. The sequel to the 2022 original, which is based on a children book series, is expected to reel in as much as $22.8 million over three days. 3 The animated comedy 'The Bad Guys 2' is the sequel to the 2022 original. ©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection The legacy sequel 'The Naked Gun' took third, with $6.3 million in earnings on its opening night. Advertisement The fourth film in the 'Naked Gun' comedy franchise, it stars Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson, who have sparked dating rumors given their undeniable chemistry on the movie's press tour. The film is expected to take in a three-day total of $16.5 million, making it the second highest opener for the franchise since 1991's 'Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear.' 'Superman' glided into fourth, two notches down from last Friday, with a $3.95 million take. 3 'The Naked Gun' co-stars Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson have been igniting romance rumors. ©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection Advertisement On Thursday, the James Gunn-directed flick passed the $300 million mark, becoming the first DC film to do that since 2022's 'The Batman.' In fifth was 'Jurassic World Rebirth' with a haul of $1.543 million.
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Yahoo
The Wildest Space Scene Of The Year Is In A New Family Movie
The golden age of Disney and Pixar is long gone, and modern animated family movies rarely exert much effort anymore. Enter The Bad Guys 2, a sequel to an okay adaptation of a series of graphic novels for children. The sequel is more than OK, it's a blast. The Bad Guys made plenty of money by being alright. The sequel could have made similar money by being alright again. They didn't have to try all that hard, which is why they deserve tons of praise. Try hard is exactly what the Bad Guys 2 team did. Bad Guys 2 is better than the first Bad Guys in nearly every way. It's a wild animated adventure with its own sense of style and nonstop momentum set to one of the best motion picture soundtracks of the year. The score by Daniel Pemberton is fantastic, but it'll get almost no credit because it's in a kids' movie that isn't trying to be serious. Pemberton is a legitimate talent. He did the score for the first Bad Guys, but he's also the ear behind the noteworthy music in Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse. The score especially shines during the movie's best action sequence. It's one of the most energetic, fun, cartoony rocket launches ever laid out on screen. The movie's almost worth seeing just to watch Wolf, Snake, Shark, Piranha, and Legs scaling that rocket in mid-flight. It leads to the second-best space sequence of the year, beaten out only by the wild space chase in Marvel's new Fantastic Four. By now, I probably should have explained that this franchise is about a group of traditionally evil characters (The Big Bad Wolf, for example) who decide to stop being bad and try to be good. The second movie begins where the first movie left off, with our heroes having completed their transition away from being villains, only to discover that no one trusts them and they can't get a job. They get wrapped up in a heist with other still-bad guys, and things spin out of control. What's important is that every movie frame is packed with something exciting and fun. It never stops moving and creating. In that sense, Bad Guys 2 captures the feeling of the books. If you've read any of them with your kids, you know the strength of Aaron Blabey's books is how free they feel, as if anything and everything is always on the table at all times. The books are a non-stop thrill, and the sequel captures that better than the first movie. I'm not suggesting here that this is the kind of movie adults should seek out, without kids. You'll need someone under the age of 12 along with you to enjoy what The Bad Guys 2 has to offer. But if you go, you'll love this turbo-charged cartoon ride. Solve the daily Crossword
