Despite featuring a relatively unknown character, Captain Marvel was released in 2019 and made over $1 billion at the worldwide box office. It was a good movie, but just having "Marvel" in its title was likely enough to help it break box office records.
The landscape has since changed, and superhero movies are no longer easily surpassing $1 billion in ticket sales. That's evident from relatively muted openings for Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
According to Variety, Marvel Studios is "thrilled" with the reboot's $218 million opening weekend, and that it's managed to bring Marvel's First Family back to the big screen. The movie has earned positive reviews from fans and critics alike after three 20th Century Fox duds just about killed the franchise.
Showing how much things have changed is The Fantastic Four: First Steps' $4.5 million haul in China this past weekend (Superman made $6.5 million). In 2019, Avengers: Endgame earned $614 million in the Middle Kingdom alone.
"There’s a reset of what a hit is, and I don’t see them consistently hitting $1 billion as before — without China, with Disney+ exposure, post-COVID, without megastars," one top agent who represents several MCU clients tells the trade. "China used Marvel, Disney and the U.S. film industry to seed their own." Another insider adds, "We are never going to have those days again."
The Fantastic Four: First Steps' cast kept its budget at a manageable $200 million, and it's said that the movie only ran into one hurdle: a battle over screenwriting credits. Ultimately, the WGA stepped in to award final screenwriting credit to Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan, Ian Springer, and Kat Wood.
Addressing the new box office norm, analyst Shawn Robbins explained, "I think as an industry we’ve become very obsessed with opening-weekend results, in particular with both ['Superman' and 'Fantastic Four']. Because word of mouth is so strong for both, I think the story is not fully obvious yet."
"Yes, 'Fantastic Four' is good enough in terms of it exceeded what Disney expected. So that’s a positive. And it’s tough to compare it to any other Marvel films because we simply live in a different time now for the superhero releases."
Things are changing at Marvel Studios to address this different status quo, and that extends to the upcoming X-Men reboot from Thunderbolts* filmmaker Jake Schreier. The studio is "fine-tuning" Michael Lesslie's script, and while casting will begin soon, Marvel has indicated to reps that it's looking for talent rather than A-Listers to "keep the cost down."
X-Men is not the mystery movie scheduled for July 23, 2027, and neither is Blade or another Deadpool, as the "Marvel brain trust is feeling no sense of urgency on the long-gestating" projects. However, Ryan Coogler's Black Panther 3 is "creating excitement internally."
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is now playing in theaters.