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

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…