Fantastic Four Box Office Drop Poses Tough Questions for MCU and Superheroes

Last week I was away on assignment in San Diego. For that reason, I was not able to write about the opening weekend of The Fantastic Four: First Steps. But if I had, like many I would have noted the film’s $117.7 million debut was a positive sign for the MCU, offering the best launch for a “new” (relatively speaking) intellectual property at Marvel Studios since Captain Marvel in 2019. If you wanted to view the Fantastic Four IP in its larger, fuller context, First Steps still opened more than $90 million higher than the dire Fan4stic in 2015, which crashed stateside with a meager $25.7 million a decade ago. An uptick of 78 percent for a reboot is definitely some kind of brand rehabilitation. So if audiences liked what they saw, the MCU was taking a bold first step away from the ennui of the last couple years.

But that was last week. And now with the estimates for a second weekend in, we are getting a clearer idea of just what audiences made of Marvel’s First Family, and unfortunately it seems less enthusiastic than those of us in the press.

With estimates pegging The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ second weekend at $40 million as of press time, the superhero sequel is expected to have tumbled a severe 66 percent. In spite of a solid, if not ecstatic, “A-” score from polled audiences last week, it seems word of mouth on the Matt Shakman-directed sequel is proving to be about as anemic as Captain America: Brave New World, which plummeted 68.3 percent during its second weekend in February, as well as Thor: Love and Thunder, which dropped 67.7 percent in its sophomore frame in 2023. It’s an even steeper drop than Eternals’ 62.3 percent fall from grace in 2021, back when an MCU movie underperforming was viewed as an anomaly as opposed to a persistent trend.

To  be clear, unlike Eternals or Cap 4, Fantastic Four had a solid, nine-figure opening weekend. So it is not a “flop” despite what social media chatter might say. But to acknowledge the numbers are coming in below what Marvel Studios angled to be the beginning of “Phase Six” is an understatement. The film was designed to give a glowing introduction to some of the central figures of presumably the next 10 years of Marvel movies, and it did everything many fans and critics (including myself) have been asking for years: tell a self-contained story that’s focused on character, emotion, and not cameos and interconnected worldbuilding.

And yet, the movie still is proving to be greeted with a general indifference from mainstream moviegoers in a way that seemed almost unfathomable five years ago. So what might this mean headed into next year’s Avengers: Doomsday and beyond?

First and foremost, it would seem superhero fatigue—or at least MCU fatigue—remains a stubborn and growing concern even when couched in a film that was generally well-received by critics and the core superhero genre fanbase. There are major exceptions of course, including most spectacularly Marvel’s very own Deadpool & Wolverine last year, which grossed a cool $1.3 billion after a similar July launch. That movie also dropped a more generally acceptable 54.2 percent in its second weekend, despite the R-rated caped movie opening north of $211 million (which conventional wisdom would suggest should have made it more front-loaded).

That movie also featured many of the elements that Marvel’s critics have been most frustrated with: a preponderance of fan service and an over-reliance on nostalgia and “easter egg” callbacks to previous superhero movies, most of them from the now defunct 20th Century Fox X-Men “universe” of movies. But it also made bank, just like Spider-Man: No Way Home did in 2021 and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022, which was similarly marketed around the prospect of seeing Patrick Stewart reprise his X-Men role again.

Cumulatively, this does seem to suggest that online fans doth protest too much about wanting “new stories” and characters in their superhero movies. Admittedly the Fantastic Four vs. the Silver Surfer/Galactus saga has been done before onscreen via 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, yet that is a movie which is little loved and even less remembered. Curiously though, the 2020s movie that features Chris Evans playing a relic from Rise of the Silver Surfer for a few minutes before he gets flayed in a gross-out sight gag was embraced far more by general audiences than a much more faithful (and frankly quality) adaptation of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s First Family.

A case can be made that taken on its own, audiences simply didn’t care for First Steps as much as CinemaScore or even critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes might suggest. I have anecdotally met more than a few True Believers who were far harsher on the movie’s clear post-production tinkering fingerprints, as well as its graywashed aesthetic, which clashed with the film’s nominal attempt to channel some ‘60s go-go fun.

Yet I might argue these critiques could be applied to many MCU movies, including back in the romanticized glory days of the 2010s where the strongest authorial voice was usually the “house style” of a carefully calibrated formula that audiences embraced. Nowadays, however, that same formula seems to be hitting a wall of diminishing returns. Another way to put this is 17 years ago, teenagers were loving the new MCU movies. Now they might be having children of their own who would rather watch Minecraft or even the apparently evergreen scenario of greedy capitalists getting eaten by dinosaurs.

Still, there are few alternative lessons to be considered here. While Fantastic Four just suffered a precipitous drop, and Warner Bros. and DC’s own hard universe-reset in Superman proved to have sturdier legs when it opened slightly bigger and then fell a healthy 53.2 percent in its second weekend, neither superhero movie seems destined to cross $700 million worldwide. Kal-El will even have to use all his strength scrape past $600 million worldwide. Comparatively, Universal’s Jurassic World reboot that also opened this month has a shot at $800 million worldwide.

There just might be a new ceiling to the superhero genre that Hollywood has been reluctant to accept. There are outliers of course, but they tend to rely on nostalgia for the “old brands” in the same way that the industry’s steady diet of legacy sequels in the 2010s also relied on dragging Harrison Ford or Jeff Goldblum out of franchise retirement. So bringing Hugh Jackman back as Wolverine, or Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man, or maybe (just maybe) Robert Downey Jr. back as an altogether different character in next year’s Avengers: Doomsday can supercharge some of these movies.

But in the new normal, expecting superhero movies to cross $800 million, much less $1 billion, worldwide is looking increasingly like antiquated pie-in-the-sky thinking. Even other long-in-the-tooth franchises like those dinosaurs at Universal aren’t doing what they did a decade ago—they’re just still making more than the cape stuff.

All of which is to say that Fantastic Four’s second weekend is in line with how other franchises of the past have been perceived as exceptionally front-loaded. There remains a core and dedicated fanbase who the studios would be wise to win over, but even when they do, the chance of bringing in the “casual” moviegoer without a splashy nostalgia play is only going to get harder. In which case, it will be a lot more difficult to continue justifying reported budgets in the neighborhood of $200 million or the system that enables those ballooning price tags by way of reshoots and heavy VFX tinkering up to the last minute.

Or, conversely, there remains the contrarian argument that Marvel is in a rebuilding phase. Like Batman Begins’ soft opening eight years after the financial and creative boondoggle of Batman & Robin, the studio and genre are still in the process of winning back folks’ trust. And keep in mind that neither Thor nor Captain America: The First Avenger were paradigm-shifters in 2011. We’d even argue that critiques about visuals and editing applied to First Steps are likewise apparent in First Avenger 14 years ago. However, both movies were a solid enough foot in the door, and a year later after being juiced up via the hype for the first Avengers crossovers, both IPs benefitted from a big bump in their sequels.

Perhaps Fantastic Four can bounce back just as well after anchoring a couple of Avengers flicks that similarly feature Downey over the next couple years? Maybe, once again, it really will come down to how Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars are received. At least in the meantime, Marvel (and Sony!) have as close to a sure-thing as possible on the horizon: Spider-Man: Brand New Day. And, in case you missed it, the studios have already confirmed it will feature crossovers with Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk and Jon Bernthal’s Punisher to boot…