Fantastic Four Fails? Why Marvel Struggles For Footing Post-‘Endgame'

Forbes

2 days ago

The Fantastic Four: First Steps will likely end it's theatrical box office run at around $510 million, plus or minus $10 million. In the aftermath of 2019's Avengers: Endgame, the capstone to a 12-year 'Infinity Saga,' Marvel has struggled to find its footing. Why?
Fantastic Four And Marvel By The Numbers
The degree of Marvel's struggles, and when exactly they really began, is a complicated discussion, and the problems they've faced are a combination of factors.
First and foremost, Avengers: Endgame delivered a gigantic capstone to a run of films that became a shared cultural experience for the world, and the post-Endgame period was a slow sigh of sorts as the cinematic adrenaline rush diminished. It's not surprising that the ceiling for the genre settled into a lower level that will be more sustainable. So that's an easy enough one to see and understand, and was in fact anticipated by many.
Secondly, the MCU isn't what it was during its first saga, a new world building heading toward a final reckoning where everything paid off and tied up. It was fresh and doing something nobody's done before, and Marvel stuck the landing. There had to be a collective sigh and post-glow, but that inevitably fades and we move forward. But afterward, the MCU was something different, and folks chasing the same buy-in were in for a shock.
The fact Spider-Man was the franchise immediately following Avengers: Endgame in 2019 was particularly extra-lucky for Marvel and audiences, but it did also set up some of the deflation feeling even heavier later since Spidey gave us temporary surprise hope that after Endgame we could stay aloft on that perpetual high, subconsciously at least.
Third, right after Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home, the Covid pandemic hit and the world shut down.
No MCU movies released for a year, and then in 2021 we suddenly had four of them – Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, and Spider-Man: No Way Home burst into theaters across just six months. All tonally different and completely unrelated, all during a partially-closed theater industry while audiences were still scared to go to multiplexes and some films released on streaming at the same time.
Notice, that the box office was just starting to try to recover, and besides Spidey's massive $1.9+ billion results the other three MCU films did well in the context of the rest of the box office that year.
During that time, audiences had to watch everything at home, a lot of movies wound up released there, a lot of kids were born and growing up during lockdowns and decreased public events for several years and closed schools.
This created a major shift in theatrical attendance that's still playing out, where family households tend to wait for the biggest IP their young children want to see as the priority, and only see three films a year nowadays, waiting to watch everything else at home. Where to spend an average of $11 per ticket for multiple people in the family, when knowing you'll also be buying a few $5-10 sodas and likely $30 or more in food, becomes an important question if you're averaging only three or four movies at most, like most families. That number could drop if the economy continues hammering folks' grocery bills and savings.
The most successful exceptions are films like Avatar where the children and parents and single adults and teenagers all love the film, or the examples where an adult-appealing movie is also so appealing to children that parents bring the youngsters even if it's not entirely fitting (like to Deadpool & Wolverine or Jurassic World: Rebirth).
Blockbuster status in today's theatrical marketplace is reserved for globally kid-appealing movies first and foremost, with room for two or three adults-/parents-first films that also appeal to kids, and maybe a lucky parents/adults movie that breaks out as the choice for date night when there's a babysitter.
Superhero films and franchises built on the brands most appealing to kids first and then also parents and adults (Superman), or appealing to parents and other adults primarily but equally as much to children (the R-rated Deadpool & Wolverine), are part of that winning formula for Marvel and DC going forward, in my opinion, at least unless/until a new paradigm takes hold at the box office (which I don't see happening until the right forces come into play, which won't happen for a while if I'm correct).
But films like The Fantastic Four: First Steps that appeal first to parents, and then to other adults, and then to children are going to be iffier. So people will wait to find out what other adults say, and then rank it as a priority against other films in theaters. If the quality is anything other than A+, A, or A- then you better have long legs overseas and be fun enough on a big screen people will pay to watch it anyway, like Jurassic World.
So moving back to the historical perspective again to really pinpoint how and when changes began and how it's affected Marvel directly, we can see that whole evolution of audience attendance was starting to assert itself after the Covid period of shutdowns and fearful attendance.
But once again, Spidey showed up to remind everyone why they love Marvel, and the payoff carried over momentum to the excellent Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness. The fact it followed and continued the multiverse from Spider-Man: Far From Home probably boosted it as well.
Thor: Love & Thunder saw some decline from Ragnarok, but that was a high-point of the franchise before Covid and co-starring the Hulk, so a follow-up making $760 million box office (compared to Ragnarok's $855 million) was still solidly in the second-tier where Thor's franchise has comfortably resided during all of their relative releases.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever saw a sizable drop-off in box office, but the death of the lead actor and his absence from the sequel undeniably hit the film's reception and performance hard. $859 isn't top-tier like the original film, but it's still another strong performance out the gate "post"-Covid, and ahead of most other films in the marketplace at the time.
So all things considered and despite some bumps here and there, the media and fan narrative that Marvel suffered a lot in those first post-Covid years isn't an accurate estimation of what went on at all. Marvel navigated the shutdowns and initial revival better than anyone, frankly, and had multiple big blockbuster hits during this period right after Avengers: Endgame, even if the ceiling on potential box office came down to Earth a bit.
Notice, though, those last two films – Thor: Love & Thunder and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – really had particularly adult-skewing perspectives and appeal first and foremost, with the kid-accessibility in around third place.
This is where I believe important blocks of mainstream audiences started to apply a new far more family-and-child skewed preference for spending money at theaters. It's a subtle shift in some ways, but I'm talking about specifically blockbuster-status films, so roughly at least $500-600 million on the lowest end, and at least $1-2+ billion on the high end.
You can read the details of the audience paradigm shift in my article about how Superman won the family audience that Fantastic Four couldn't quite capture. It all goes a long way to explaining what we've seen happen to Marvel at the box office the past three years, with the studio suffered ups and downs along with everyone else.
So continuing our accountant trip down memory lane, in 2023 the real problems began for Marvel and we saw the full manifestation of 'the new normal' in theaters. Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania disappointed and The Marvels face-planted, with only Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3 delivering its usual blockbuster results because it's widely beloved by all-ages audiences and continued to deliver exactly what each segment of the audience wanted and expected (which doesn't mean being predictable, it means living up to the promise of the premise).
I think both of 2023's failed MCU releases suffered first and foremost from the new paradigm, and audiences being unclear about who the films were mostly for, with the former looking like it was too different from previous family-friendly Ant-Man movies but not fully enough Avengers-level to ensure 'something for everybody.' For the latter, I think a combo of confusion about its ties to a streaming show, a changed title that buried the lede of it being a sequel to Captain Marvel, and the marketing being too unclear about the target age demographic all added up to sink the film's chances.
In 2024, Marvel took no chances and released exactly one single film: Deadpool & Wolverine, which I've already explained in terms of how it fits into the new paradigm, which explains its $1.3 billion result.
But this year's Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts* very openly skewed much more toward adult audiences, and didn't market on much for kids, who were expected to just keep showing up because it's superheroes and their parents might want to see it. Problem is, parents didn't, for the reasons already explained.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps received overwhelming praise from critics and audiences alike, and the marketing tried to really sell it hard as a new look for the MCU and a new future ahead, built around family and serious storytelling that stands on its own.
Unfortunately, the latter aspects suggested to a lot of potential viewers that Fantastic Four is a more dramatic and adult-skewing movie, where dangers and child-threat elements might be too scary or off-putting to the youngest kids and their parents. Especially true when Superman is playing across the hall, with a flying dog and all the parents at school saying 'take your kids, it's the best time at the movies this year.'
Fantastic Four: Fantastic Future?
Next up are for Marvel Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, both of which rely heavily on the Fantastic Four, and after which the newly re-imagined MCU will put Fantastic Four front and center with a rebooted X-Men.
Is there a danger that, even with the return of the Russo Brothers to direct and Robert Downey Jr. as (unexpectedly) the villainous Doctor Doom, Avengers might underperform? Doubtful, since the films will be packed full of the characters audiences do love so much, and will be far more akin to previous Avengers films that applied a perpetually winning formula of appealing to everybody simultaneously.
But what of the aftermath, and the new soft-rebooted MCU?
I think an obvious answer for Fantastic Four would be a sequel with an Earth-based threat, and Spider-Man showing up early at the Baxter Building asking to join and have a funny apologetic scuffle with the Fantastic Four, then during the climax Spidey could show up and help out, they could talk about potential to become the 'Fantastic Five,' but Peter Parker can't remove his webbed mask and he can't fully commit the way they need, so he reluctantly bows out), as well as a few Avengers in a cameo scene (a video call, even), and make a story first and foremost for the kids and younger fans. Putting much/most of the perspective from Sue's and Reed's kids would be a smart choice, too.
For the X-Men, I think if there was ever any doubt that the rebooted MCU version should be teenagers, it should be gone now. There's no live-action MCU movie franchise starring teenagers and kids, but there should be. And seriously, Marvel, cast actual teenagers or young-college-age at most, so that you retain the identification with younger audience through more than a single film.
Kevin Feige and James Gunn are both smarter than I am and have more experience at this than me, so if I figured this out then they surely have by now. And they no doubt already have plans in place to do what's necessary in the new theatrical landscape, but I hope the rest of the folks at their respective studios and higher-ups at parent companies recognize the truth as well, and let these two make the choices in how to handle it.
But I would be any successful decisions result in films much more targeted toward the kids and teenagers first, and less of the appeal to older adult fans as the dominant target audience for the storytelling and perspective.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps failed to become an MCU summer blockbuster tentpole as hoped and expected by many of us, for a host of reasons having nothing to do with the film's quality or even the marketing, the latter both looking and being perfect for any time other than the past 18 months. For the sake of their future, Marvel's needs to implement a more family and child-focused approach, as DC Studios so far has already mastered. And if both studios rise to the challenge, we'll be in for a new golden age of superhero cinema.