James Gunn’s Superman has sold more tickets than any other superhero movie this year, flying past all three Marvel Cinematic Universe offerings. Its most climactic box office battle came when The Fantastic Four: First Steps challenged the DCU launchpad in the same exact month. Eventually the final MCU film of 2025 surpassed $500 million, but that wasn’t enough for Superman, which leaped higher than $600 million globally.
The DC Universe is just kicking off, yet for the firmly established MCU, July has been looking like more of a theatrical sweet spot lately. Despite not catching up to Superman, First Steps outpaced the franchises other two movies in 2025. And last year’s singular MCU release, Deadpool & Wolverine, also landed in July. That was the studios first billion-dollar haul since Spider-Man: No Way Home, three years earlier.
Next July, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is slated to spin a web at the box office as the only MCU movie prior to Avengers: Doomsday, which is scheduled for December 2026. And even though Avengers: Secret Wars is currently the studio’s lone 2027 title named for that year, it has been reported that Marvel is reserving July 23, 2027 for a yet to be announced sub-franchise film.
If Marvel Studios keeps that date on the calendar, we could be seeing a repeat of the July 2025 box office battle. James Gunn has claimed July 9, 2027 for his Superman sequel, Man of Tomorrow. Just like First Steps came out two weeks after Gunn’s first Superman, the MCU’s July 23rd date is also exactly two weeks after the Superman follow-up.
Would Marvel be wise to allow this to materialize after being outmatched in July 2025? Will Superman’s positive reception yield increased enthusiasm for the sequel? Of course, fans of the genre will first need to find out what superhero is planned to compete against Superman, with likely candidates shaping up to be Black Panther, Doctor Strange, or Thor.
Momentum may have a big part to play in how well the “to be determined” Marvel movie performs in theaters. And the benefit for the MCU in July 2027 could be the movie’s proximity to an Avengers tentpole. Most Avengers-adjacent solo outings have received box office boosts from its association with the team-up attraction.
Avengers: Infinity War became the MCU’s first $2 billion behemoth in 2018 and some of Black Panther’s success earlier that year, could be attributed to its lead-in to Avengers: Infinity War. Then, the post-Infinity War feature, Ant-Man and the Wasp, was the highest grossing film in the Ant-Man trilogy.
In 2019, the MCU was anchored by Avengers: Endgame, lifting up the numbers for Captain Marvel and Spider-Man: Far From Home, which came out before and after Endgame, respectively. Both of those movies reached the billion-dollar mark, while Endgame made history with $2.8 billion.
Based on the empirical evidence, one could expect a singular MCU event film that lands between the fifth and sixth Avengers epics to generate a considerable draw at cinemas. However, less than a decade after Endgame, the theatrical landscape is shifting quite a bit, bringing much more uncertainty when it comes to box office expectations.
Even some of the best that MCU has to offer, Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, had a harder time earning money compared to some lesser MCU projects of the 2010s. Thunderbolts* ended its run with about $383 million and First Steps’ haul will fall under $550 million. By comparison, Thor: The Dark World made $645 million in 2013.
Even Superman’s victory over the MCU is left with an unfortunate reminder that the much less beloved Man of Steel out-performed James Gunn’s revamped take on the hero twelve years ago, without adjusting for inflation. So, it is more difficult to determine who might prevail in terms of revenue, when the quality of filmmaking is not a guarantee for financial success. The biggest winners are the core superhero movie fans, who will certainly love another July with Superman and a big MCU movie to look forward to.