Captain Marvel and her colleagues like to talk about going higher, further, faster. Unfortunately, that just didn’t happen this time.
The Marvels, a sequel to the first Captain Marvel movie and the first season of the Ms. Marvel Disney+ show, is nearing the conclusion of its run in theaters with extremely disappointing box office results. To date, the movie has earned just $80.7 million in U.S. theaters and $197 million worldwide. That makes it — by a pretty significant margin — the lowest-grossing movie in the entire history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which now stretches back a full 15 years and more than 30 movies.
The previous lowest-grossing film in the MCU was the poorly reviewed (although not as poorly reviewed as The Marvels) The Incredible Hulk, which grossed $265 million worldwide in theaters in 2008. For point of comparison, the last Avengers sequel earned $357 million in its opening weekend in theaters alone. Last weekend, after only a month in theaters around the country, The Marvels fell out of the top ten on the box-office chart. It earned just $2.5 million, dropping another 60 percent from its prior weekend’s total.
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The numbers confirm what many observers have been saying for months: This might be Marvel’s lowest point (commercially, if not creatively) in more than a decade. Things have gotten so bad that Disney CEO Bob Iger recently said that turning the studio around was his “number one priority,” while also admitting that the company had churned out “too many sequels” in recent years. (He also claimed that some of The Marvels’ issues stemmed from the fact that there “wasn’t as much supervision on the set” because it was shot during Covid. But … Marvel made a lot of stuff during Covid. And most of it was better than The Marvels. So I’m not sure how that excuse holds water…)
The next Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, Deadpool 3, is currently scheduled for release on July 26, 2024. It will almost certainly make more than The Marvels. But how much more? That will be very interesting to watch.
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