Fantastic Four: First Steps
Credit: Marvel
It’s been a rough year for Disney and Marvel’s MCU. Captain America: Brave New World was met with tepid reviews and a sluggish box office. Thunderbolts was better received, but the relatively unknown characters and title almost guaranteed that it would flop. More on these two in a minute.
Fantastic Four: First Steps seemed, at first, to be a rebound for Marvel. Positive reviews and audience reception fueled a strong opening weekend, though it fell short of DC’s Superman, which released just two weeks earlier. The film’s second weekend, however, was disastrous, plummeting 66% from $117.6 million to just $40 million, a significantly steeper decline than analysts predicted (55 to 60%).
When it comes to box office numbers and superhero movies, quite a few factors have to be taken into account. There are some things that are completely outside the control of movie studios.
The movie theater business was already on the decline prior to the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to the rise of streaming, but consumer behavior following the pandemic has only made matters worse. Fewer people are going to the movies now than during the MCU’s heyday. Many movie studios began releasing films direct to streaming during the pandemic, and even though that’s been reeled back significantly, the damage was done. A good chunk of the audience will simply wait until these movies come to Disney Plus or HBO Max.
Even still, the decline Fantastic Four saw week-over-week cannot be pinned entirely on consumer behavior. Superman opened with a $125 million weekend and only dropped 53% the following weekend. Both movies had strong reviews and word-of-mouth. Both had A- Cinemascores. Critics mostly praised them. So why would Fantastic Four’s decline be so much steeper than Superman’s?
The other theory posited by some online is that “superhero fatigue” has set in, and moviegoers are simply getting tired of the genre. This certainly adds to the equation, but Superman has already crossed the $300 million domestic box office mark, topping Man Of Steel ($291 million) and The Justice League ($229 million) from DC, both films released during the height of the superhero craze.
The truth is, people are not burnt out on superhero movies. Quite the opposite. People are so hungry for good superhero movies that they’re gushing about films that are okay at best. Superman was a hot mess of a movie, but fans and critics alike raved about it. And I’ll admit, despite all its flaws, I think it was a more enjoyable movie than Fantastic Four. People raved about that one, too, but aside from the cool retrofuturistic aesthetic, it’s mostly just incredibly dull with a lackluster ending. People are so desperate for good superhero movies, they’ve convinced themselves that these qualify.
But bad movies often do well at the box office (Aquaman $335 million domestically and over $1.1 billion globally) and good movies often do bad (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves $93.9 million domestically and $208.2 million globally) so even looking just at quality can’t always explain a film’s poor showing.
If we want to get down to the number one reason Fantastic Four: First Steps declined so much in its second weekend, acknowledging all these other factors, it’s simple: It’s a Fantastic Four movie. These characters are not particularly popular. No Fantastic Four movie prior to this has been very good. These are not Batman or Superman or Avengers level comic book characters. It’s more damning, ultimately, that Captain America did so poorly. Captain America ought to be a major hit for Marvel at this point, but Brave New World was a confusing mess and very few people are particularly excited about Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson taking on the role of Captain America, while Bucky (Sebastian Stan) – a more sensible choice given his old friendship with Steve Rogers – is tucked away in Thunderbolts.
The problem with superhero movies these days is that the people who make them are out of touch with the people who watch them. They have forgotten who the target audience is, and why moviegoers head to the movies in the first place. To his credit, James Gunn was right to go with a popular DC hero like Superman for his DCU reboot (and smart to choose mostly less-expensive stars to fill the roles, because budgets are absolutely out of control). He just happened to also write one of his worst scripts for the film.
Between lousy scripts (Fantastic Four’s is terrible) and characters most moviegoers don’t care about, superhero fatigue and sluggish box office numbers are less about people not wanting these types of movies and more about the quality of the movies we keep getting from both Marvel and DC. Give the people what they want. Find better writers. There’s plenty of life left in the genre. The question is whether the people in charge have the creativity and wherewithal to bring audiences back.
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