Over the course of the past year, Marvel Studios has made significant progress in striving to curb its worsening reputation amongst fans and critics alike. Even the head of the studio, Kevin Feige, recently admitted that amidst the brand’s post-Endgame exposure and pivot to encompass regular Disney+ exclusives that it became a case of “quantity over quality” during the early 2020s. It certainly didn’t help matters that there was a global pandemic occurring at the same time, which put the bulk of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s projects on hold and reorganized their entire release schedule. As a result, 2020 was the first year without a Marvel Studios project released since 2009.
Between this unplanned break, the glut of new Marvel content releasing on Disney+, and the lessening quality of the products themselves once they did start hitting theaters again, Marvel had a real problem on their hands. The franchise that had once been the envy of every studio in Hollywood, so much that it inspired countless others to try their hands at building interconnected shared universes, was suddenly in trouble. While the box office results of these films were still largely quite good, with some still hitting the coveted billion dollar mark (Spider-Man: No Way Home, Deadpool & Wolverine), the word of mouth surrounding the franchise was turning increasingly sour. To combat this, Feige and co. made the difficult choice to shift directions midstream.
Suddenly, Disney+ was being deprioritized as a release model, and the studio was seeking to prioritize higher-quality projects rather than slapdash efforts. It took a while for the fruits of this labor to be seen, but it started working. Agatha All Along was both a critical and commercial success for Disney Plus, setting the stage for Marvel's comeback. In 2025, projects like Thunderbolts*, Daredevil: Born Again, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps are all direct results of this changed-up initiative. By and large, the effort seems to have worked, as each of these products has received substantially better reviews and general reception from audiences than earlier efforts.
To see the stark contrast between these works and those of the last few years, one need only look at the chasm of difference in quality between Captain America: Brave New World (a much-delayed entry from the earlier methodology) and Thunderbolts*. However, in an unexpected wrinkle, it may be too late to put the proverbial genie back in the lamp for the House of Mouse’s most treasured blockbuster brand.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps falters in its second weekend at domestic box office
Earlier this summer, despite built-in second-week marketing tactics (such as revealing the ‘real’ name of the film to be The New Avengers) Thunderbolts* saw its strong opening weekend at the box office give way to less than stellar stamina. The end result was one of the lowest-grossing MCU films of the past decade, and now, Fantastic Four looks to be suffering a similar fate. While the film had an opening weekend to rival similar July blockbusters such as Jurassic World Rebirth and Superman, Fantastic Four’s second-Friday gross saw it fall more than 80%. Its second weekend fared better overall with a 60% drop, but this was still sharper than that of Thunderbolts*.
Fatally, what these box office statistics seem to indicate is that in the years since Endgame, Marvel has lost its hold on the general public. Hardcore fans of the franchise, the ones who keep up with the ins-and-outs of everything, they’re showing up opening weekend to see these new films. But a franchise cannot survive off of that alone; general audiences are the lifeblood of the blockbuster filmmaking industry. And judging from the trajectories of Marvel’s two most recent films, the dyed-in-the-wool fans are rushing out to catch the films opening weekend, inflating projections moving forward, and leaving Marvel to look grossly unprepared when those projections are ultimately proved wrong.
This is especially bad news for Marvel, given that they are currently in-production on their next massive event film, Avengers: Doomsday, whose cast is significantly comprised of returning characters from its past two films, Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
In addition to that, Doomsday is shaping up to be some of the most inside-baseball stuff that Marvel has ever done, with the film bringing back characters from previous iterations of franchises such as X-Men from two decades ago and blending them together with the modern characters through multiversal shenanigans. As such, it’s a ridiculously lore-heavy film that features an all-star cast of characters assembled from movies that general audiences are simply not showing up for anymore, all of which bodes incredibly poorly for the film’s financial prospects.
What makes all of this all the sadder is that Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps are genuinely two of the strongest films Marvel has put out in several years. The studio clearly learned its lessons and took them to heart, delivering a much higher quality of work after reprioritizing things. However, as Fantastic Four’s unanticipated box office dip suggests, it may have been too little, too late to save face with general audiences across the globe.
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