Disney Lost $619 Million In Takings On Each Marvel Movie Over Past Two Years

Disney’s recent Marvel movies have lacked the box office draw of their predecessors © 2023 MARVEL.

Courtesy of Marvel Studios

It is no secret that Disney’s Marvel Studios division doesn’t have the same punching power at the box office that it used to.

Over the five years up to 2020, seven of its super hero movies grossed more than $1 billion giving the franchise some of the highest average takings in the industry. However, over the five years since 2020 only Deadpool & Wolverine and Spider-Man: No Way Home have joined the billion dollar club forcing Marvel to put a new spin on things.

Nearly 20 years ago Marvel’s movies became smash hits with adults thanks to their serious treatment of the beloved super hero stories that they grew up with.

Traditional tropes like secret identities and gaudy costumes were dropped from the characters and A List actors like Scarlett Johansson and Samuel L. Jackson signed on to play them. Just like in the real world, the events in one movie affected the next as all of the storylines were interconnected in the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The movies are even split into phases with each one focusing on different threats.

The decline in audience interest wasn’t directly due to the pandemic though it contributed to it. Marvel’s penultimate movie before theaters shuttered due to Covid was Avengers: Endgame which became the highest-grossing movie in history with takings of $2.8 billion. The team-up movie tied up threads that had been left hanging in the previous 21 films so it made a natural conclusion to the series.

When the curtain came down on theaters during the pandemic, audiences weren’t left on the edge of their seats wondering what would happen in the next movie so Marvel wasn’t at the top of their minds.

Compounding the problem, when theater doors swung open again, the first Marvel film that played was Black Widow which was a prequel story about a character who died in Endgame. This meant that the movie lacked tension as audiences knew both that the character would make it through and that the plot would have no ramifications for her story arc in future movies.

Making matters worse, soon afterwards came Eternals which had an implausible premise about immortal aliens on earth who wear cartoony costumes. It was the antithesis of some of its predecessors in the MCU and perhaps wasn’t what was needed at a time when audiences were wary of returning to theaters as a deadly disease was still raging.

Once followers missed one MCU movie it kickstarted a vicious circle as it made them more reluctant to watch the next in case they didn’t understand it. In turn they thought the next would be even harder to follow and so on. Once they got out of the viewing habit it became harder to tempt them back.

Disney initially capitalized on fans being stuck indoors as it commissioned a slew of Marvel streaming shows and connected their storylines to the movies in the hope it would attract viewers to them and vice versa. However, as the Covid vaccine rolled out and fans went back to work they had less time to watch streaming shows. Once they missed one of them it contributed to the vicious circle of declining viewing.

Although the adult audience returned to work, the same wasn’t true of younger generations so Marvel began aiming its movies and shows more in their direction with increasingly fanciful plots, younger actors and even talk of a team-up film featuring child super heroes. That approach put some adults off even more whilst young kids seemed to be looking for more juvenile entertainment in theaters hence the wild popularity of films like Minecraft and The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

The popularity of last summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine offered a brief glimmer of hope that Marvel movies still had the potential to rise to heady heights. However, the movie’s entire premise was that it mocked Marvel and its new approach so it’s no surprise that it appealed to a disenchanted adult audience. It was abundantly clear that there was no need to have seen previous MCU instalments to understand it as Deadpool & Wolverine was unlike its predecessors with scenes full of foul language and violence.

Repeating its success will take more than the wave of a magic wand which is why Marvel is putting a new spin on its approach. Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige outlined it in an interview with Variety in July and said that one of the first steps was “grinding down the budget.” He explained that budgets had begun to balloon following Endgame, partly due to “feeling the need to deliver a certain level of spectacle.”

Feige added that in future, Marvel’s streaming shows will have far less overlap with the feature films to ensure that audiences know they don’t have to watch everything to follow what is going on. “Allowing a TV show to be a TV show is what we’re returning to.” There will also be fewer of them which will also make it easier for fans to keep up if they do want to watch them all.

“We all know that in our zeal to flood our streaming platform with more content, that we turned to all of our creative engines, including Marvel, and had them produce a lot more,” explained Disney’s chief executive Bob Iger during Disney’s second quarter earnings call in May.

“We’ve also learned over over time that quantity does not necessarily beget quality. And frankly, we’ve all admitted to ourselves that we lost a little focus by making too much. By consolidating a bit and having Marvel focus much more on their films, we believe that will result in better quality.”

He added that Marvel’s next movie, Thunderbolts*, was “the first and best example” of its new approach. “I feel very good about that,” he said. However, despite being critcally acclaimed, Thunderbolts* too didn’t take the box office by storm and grossed just $382.4 million. “Thunderbolts* I thought was a very, very good movie,” Feige told Variety.

“But nobody knew that title and many of those characters were from a [TV] show. Some [audiences] were still feeling that notion of, ‘I guess I had to have seen these other shows to understand who this is.’ If you actually saw the movie, that wouldn’t be the case, and we make the movie so that’s not the case. But I think we still have to make sure the audience understands that.”

Feige told Variety that he was especially excited about Marvel’s latest movie, The Fantastic Four: First Steps because of how it reflects the company’s goal of making projects that don’t intimidate casual fans. “It is a no-homework-required movie. It literally is not connected to anything we’ve made before,” he said.

Nevertheless, that didn’t stop the movie from failing to pack as much of a punch at the box office as its predecessors. It has grossed $507.8 million which, like the tally for Thunderbolts*, is well below the recent average. In itself, that is 50% down on the phase three peak.

Disney, like all movie studios, only gets a share of its movies’ theater takings, which is typically around 50% and is known in the trade as a rental fee. However, the studio goes to great lengths to promote its box office haul so the dramatic loss of average takings on one of its flagship franchises is far from a dream ticket.

However, perhaps an even bigger problem is the fact that both Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps lead directly into next year’s Avengers: Doomsday which is likely to be one of Marvel’s most expensive movies due to its ensemble cast which reads like a roll call for the Oscars and is headlined by the return of Robert Downey Jr.

In an attempt to recapture Endgame’s success, Doomsday features even more A Listers and is billed as being an end to the current version of the MCU with Feige telling Variety that a “reset” will debut in 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars.

The big question is whether enough fans have watched the recent movies to want to see how Doomsday ties up the threads in them thereby enabling it to make a profit. One thing that’s for sure is that if this group of heroes can’t get enough people into theater seats then nobody can.