The Golden Age of Superhero Movies Is Over, Like It Or Not

'Superman' and 'Fantastic Four' Underperforming is Good for Movies

For Marvel Studios, this weekend’s news is anything but fantastic.

After a respectable $117M domestic opening, The Fantastic Four: First Steps cratered in its second weekend. No, seriously, it plummeted to earth like a Kryptonian spaceship (different franchise, I know). Week-over-week, the Matt Shankman-directed film dropped by a larger-than-expected 66%. That’s on par with Marvel’s prolonged string of creative and commercial failures, including February’s Captain America: Brave New World (down 68%), 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (down 70%), and 2022’s artistically bankrupt Thor: Love and Thunder (down 67%).

But that’s not the worst of it. On its second Friday of release, August 1st, the film grossed only $ 11 million. That is an 80% drop from its opening day just six days prior.

That’s right: eighty percent. For every five seats occupied in a theater last Friday, only one of those was peopled this weekend.

Not only that, but the Man of Steel is not soaring as high as many—myself included—expected. Even after a six-month, surround sound marketing blitz that criss-crossed the globe, James Gunn’s Superman is just closing in at $540M worldwide. While a domestic success ($305M as of Sunday), international audiences have largely rejected this most all-American of cultural exports.

It’ll be a miracle if it hits $600M when the last of the theatrical screenings wrap up.

The middling success of Superman and the commercial underperformance of Fantastic Four — the summer’s most anticipated movies — led me to an inescapable conclusion, one that I have quietly held since the aftermath of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame.

The golden age of superhero movies is over.

Don’t believe me? Well, consider this:

Over six weeks in 2019, three superhero movies — Endgame, Captain Marvel, and Shazam! — were released. They collectively grossed $4.3 billion worldwide. Over the last eight months, four superhero movies — Captain America, Thunderbolts*, Superman, and The Fantastic Four have grossed a total of $1.6 billion.

Not only that, but, for the first time since 2011 (not counting 2020 due to the pandemic), the year’s highest-grossing superhero film will not break $600M worldwide.

Much like Thanos, the end of the era is inevitable.

The prognosis was written on the wall when Tony Stark snapped his fingers. “Okay, so where do we go from here?” Narratively and artistically, Kevin Feige and company have stumbled blindly through the Multiverse Saga. Coupled with an oversaturation of the marketplace, with two to three theatrical productions and several streaming programs being released annually, superheroes at the multiplex had no clear path forward — just a downward spiral.

Pure glutton of superhero movies since 2008 evokes similar moments of genre dominance in Hollywood history. Most famously, the musical and the western. The advent of sound in the late 1920s ushered in an unmatched reign of the Hollywood musical that reached its zenith with 1965’s The Sound of Music and floundered out of fashion with 1969’s Hello, Dolly! in the early days of the rougher, grittier New Hollywood. The western, a staple of silent films, peaked commercially in the mid-50s. While much more versatile than the musical, audiences grew to find the tales of Cowboys and Indians to feel more like fantasy as the world moved further and further away from the closing of the American West.

We find ourselves in a similar moment now. As my colleague Graham Piro has often remarked, most superhero movies are a reflection of our anxieties in a post-9/11 world. Now, nearly a quarter of a century after that tragedy, the world has started to forget what happened that day—and the narrative stakes that superhero movies have provided have lost their effectiveness. Audiences are tired of the same stories, the same “dramatic” stakes, the same weightless CGI action, and the same silly sky beams.

In December 2023, movie fans looked at the final box office in awe. For the first time in twenty-two years, the three highest-grossing films were not sequels. Adjusted for inflation, all three — Barbie, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Oppenheimer — grossed over a billion dollars. There was a hope that maybe the tyranny of spandex was lifting. It took another sixteen months or so, but it appears that time has come. The success of non-superhero blockbusters like A Minecraft Movie, Sinners, F1, and Lilo and Stitch, as well as smaller films like The Naked Gun, 28 Years Later, and Materialists, shows that neither Marvel nor DC rules the cineplex like they once did.

That’s good for the marketplace.

With Marvel and DC slowing down production, more movies can gain a foothold in the theaters, find their audiences, and (hopefully) achieve success.

The more successful movies we have, the more movies get made.

The more variety in those successful movies, the more variety we have in our theaters.

Now, I’m not going to prophetically declare that we’re about to enter some new Golden Age of Moviemaking. Nor will I celebrate the end of this era. For all the creative problems I have with most superhero movies, they have kept Hollywood financially alive for the last half-decade.

Plus, like musicals and westerns before it, superheroes aren’t going away completely. The next two-part Avengers film will undoubtedly roll in the money. As will Spider-Man: Brand New Day. But it’ll be harder to bring new audiences—younger audiences—into seeing these films when Marvel is competing with younger IPs like Minecraft.

That’s why Kevin Fiege and James Gunn would do well to pause, reset, and scale down. Put these heroes into smaller, more grounded genre pieces. 2026’s body horror-influenced Clay Face could go a long way in proving this hypothesis, much like Logan (western), Wonder Woman (romantic comedy), and The Dark Knight (crime thriller) before it.

Superheroes work best when they make us believe a man can fly. In 2025, we’ve become too accustomed to it. The enterprise has lost its joy, its wonder. What we need now is a cultural reset, some time off, so that we can rediscover that wonder again one day.

In the meantime, there are plenty of good movies that merit your attention.

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