The Marvels opened to a franchise-low $46.1 million last November and, with its eight-week theatrical run at an end, it's officially Marvel Studios' lowest-grossing title in the MCU's 15+ year history.
Disney stopped reporting box office stats early last month, but the final figures are in and the Captain Marvel sequel is tapping out with $84.5 million domestically and $121.3 million internationally for a global total of $205.8 million. Needless to say, that's not a good result.
With a rumoured budget of more than $220 million, The Marvels has become Marvel Studios' biggest flop and now sits quite a bit beneath 2008's The Incredible Hulk (which grossed a then-respectable, albeit disappointing, $264 million worldwide).
Interestingly, a $205.8 million haul puts The Marvels in the same ballpark as Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey which, back in 2020, earned $205.3 million worldwide. This suggests that female-led superhero movies are still a tough sell to many moviegoers.
Of course, there has been plenty of "superhero fatigue" talk but The Marvels did land a 62% Rotten Tomatoes score and a 83% Audience Score, so it's not as if the sequel was a critical flop...however, Eternals, which was deemed Rotten, ended up grossing over $400 million during the pandemic so who knows what's going on!
While Captain Marvel earned over $1 billion in 2019, we'd imagine Carol Danvers' has taken flight in her final solo outing.
"The Marvels was shot during COVID," Disney CEO Bob Iger said of the movie's failings late last year. "There wasn't as much supervision on the set, so to speak, where we have executives [that are] really looking over what's being done day after day after day."
In The Marvels, Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel has reclaimed her identity from the tyrannical Kree and taken revenge on the Supreme Intelligence. But unintended consequences see Carol shouldering the burden of a destabilized universe.
When her duties send her to an anomalous wormhole linked to a Kree revolutionary, her powers become entangled with that of Jersey City super-fan Kamala Khan, aka Ms. Marvel, and Carol’s estranged niece, now S.A.B.E.R. astronaut Captain Monica Rambeau. Together, this unlikely trio must team up and learn to work in concert to save the universe as "The Marvels."
The movie stars Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Samuel L. Jackson, Zawe Ashton and Park Seo-joon.
The Marvels doesn't currently have a confirmed release date on Disney+ or Digital/Blu-ray.